The situation in the Cocoanut Grove the previous night leaves me feeling hopeless and despondent, which contributes to my being late for my appointment with Shorty McAdoo. I find him sitting on the step of the bunkhouse, honing the rusty blade of a shovel with a file. I take shovel-sharpening to be a way of killing time and apologize for being late, ending lamely with the word, “Complications.”
McAdoo leans the shovel carefully against the step. “Speaking of complications, friend Wylie’s in the bunkhouse.”
“What’s he doing in the bunkhouse?”
“Setting with his brother.”
McAdoo is sometimes a trial to the patience. “Okay. What’s his brother doing in the bunkhouse?”
“His brother’s dead.”
“Dead?” I say stupidly.
“Dead as old Pontius Pilate. We reckon to bury him this morning.” He indicates roughly where by pointing off beyond the derelict, ravaged house. “Wylie hauled him out here in a milk wagon.” Gauging the look on my face, McAdoo companionably pats the step beside him. I sit. He drops his voice. “Didn’t know what else to do with him. Wylie took all the money he had, every last nickel, bought Miles a coffin, had him embalmed – without he calculated a plot was going to cost extra. There Miles is, all dressed up and no place to go. The county would have give him a spot, but Wylie wouldn’t have his brother lying in a potter’s field. So he freighted him out here.”
“In a milk wagon,” I repeat.
“Wylie is acquainted with a fellow delivers milk. They pack considerable ice on a milk wagon. They took Miles with them on the route and when they was done deliveries they brought him out to me.”
“And the two of you are going to bury him this morning.”
“That bunkhouse ain’t no goddamn milk wagon. He ain’t going to stay fresh. Sooner he’s in the ground the better.”
We sit on the step, silent. I am thinking I might as well have stayed in bed.
“Can’t be helped. I know you was supposed to interview me this morning.”
“My publisher is getting impatient. He wants Indians.”
“Maybe I ain’t got no Indians to deliver.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“Why don’t you pay your respects to the deceased,” says McAdoo, turning dodgy as he always does whenever he begins to feel cornered.
“I didn’t know the deceased. Never met him.”
McAdoo gets to his feet. “You know Wylie. Wylie’d appreciate you paying your respects. And doing it ain’t going to scrape no skin off your ass.”
We enter the bunkhouse. There is a cheap coffin of some kind of garish yellow wood resting on a bier made of straight-backed chairs. Wylie sits vigil beside it, the brim of his cowboy hat buckled in his hands. The coffin lid stands directly behind him, leaning against the wall.
“Mr. Vincent come to pay his respects, Wylie,” says McAdoo. “You remember Mr. Vincent.”
Wylie, nodding sombrely, rises from the chair to shake my hand with a church deacon’s solemnity. When I attempt to take it back, he holds on grimly, a dog with a stick in his mouth. It seems he wants to lead me up to the casket for a bird’s-eye view of the corpse. Given the situation, I haven’t much choice.
A young man lies with his head propped up on a satin pillow, his complexion watery blue-white, like skim milk. The only brightness in the face is a feverish red seam where his eyelids close and two red-rimmed nostrils tilting up at us. A thatch of bushy, sandy hair is the deadest-looking thing about him, stiff, lifelessly brittle as dry wisps of summer hay.
“They cut his hair at the undertaker’s,” Wylie volunteers. “I didn’t know they cut hair at an undertaker’s.”
“What was it?” I ask. Meaning the cause of death.
Wylie looks at me. Looks at his brother. Looks at me again. “On account of the fall he took with the Running W, he busted up inside. Doctor said his liver, something else…” He stops. “He looks every bit himself though, don’t he?” Wylie still clasps my hand, gaze resting on his brother’s face. We stand in a pocket of stillness, onlookers to a greater stillness boxed by the casket. “It would have meant a lot to Brother, you coming,” Wylie confides.
I throw a glance at McAdoo, but he is stubbing out a cigarette on the stovetop, eyes downcast. No help there.
“Yessir, yessir, yessir!” Wylie yells suddenly, in a jagged, piercing voice. “You know who your friends are come a time like this! You bet I know my friends!”
“Sure you know your friends,” Shorty says calmly. “Now leave go hanging onto Mr. Vincent and screw the lid back down on Miles. Time’s come.”
He does as he is told. McAdoo motions me outside, leaving Wylie wrestling with the coffin lid.
Back out on the steps all I can do is shake my head. A loud bang is followed by the sound of wood scraping wood as Wylie jockeys the coffin lid back and forth, aligning it to take the screws.
“I told him he could bunk here with me until he found his feet,” says McAdoo.
“Ever consider that might be one hell of a long time?”
“Well, I’m riding easy now with my interviewing money,” McAdoo says. “Seven and a half a day should be able to carry us both for a time.”
“I thought you were saving money to get to Canada.”
“Could be both of us’ll go north. What’s the saying? Two can live as cheap as one.”
“That refers to marriage. If there’s anybody I wouldn’t want to hitch myself to it would be Wylie.”
“Oh,” says Shorty, “I can keep old Wylie out of my hair. Turn him to trapping quail and shooting rabbits maybe. Have him dig us a potato garden. Have him comfortable up the bunkhouse some. He takes orders like a damn, Wylie does.” Shorty turns, calls back into the bunkhouse. “You got her clamped down in there, Wylie?”
Wylie appears in the doorway. “I lost one of the screws.”
“Well, give her another look. If you find her, that’s good. If you don’t, in the long run that don’t matter neither.”
Wylie goes back in.
“We’ll have Wylie tote the light end of the casket – the legs. You and me can take the head,” suggests Shorty.
“I happen to have a bum leg.”
“We ain’t going far. I’d go to the bank on you being able to carry your share.”
After some confusion – I have to switch to the left so that I can swing my stiff leg without knocking it against the casket – we get the funeral cortege moving.
Despite his age, McAdoo manages better than I do. I admire the fiercely set jaw, the tendons stretched tautly along the thin, muscular stalk of neck. My arm burns with the strain and I can only make thirty or forty yards before begging for a halt. We lower the coffin to the ground, take a quick blow, and then McAdoo curtly bobs his head, the signal to stoop, lift, and scurry on. We make our way from bunkhouse to burned ranch-house, and then several hundred yards more, stumbling up a low hogbacked rise selected by Wylie as his brother’s final resting place.
We set the coffin down. While I survey the scene, Wylie goes back to collect the tools. Underfoot, nothing but floury dust and dusty plants wilting back to dust. The inky etching of the fired house. The horizon a smudgy glare, the sun sucking blue out of the sky with a voracious mouth.
I sit down in the dust. “He could have put him under a tree at least. There’s that orange tree just west of the bunkhouse.”
“Well,” says Shorty, “them Easton boys come from open country. Wylie wanted to give Miles a look in every direction.”
Wylie’s back with the tools. McAdoo takes the pick from him. “The ground here’s harder than a whore’s heart. I’ll have to loosen it some before you can shovel.” He starts to work, rocking back on his heels with each swing, slinging forward onto his toes, shuddering as the pick bites the resisting ground. The steel rings fervently when it strikes a stone. As the blood flushes his face, Shorty falls into a rhythmical grunting, a sweet basso punctuation marking the rise and fall of the pick. Beside me, his knees drawn up to his chin, Wylie monotonously extols the virtues of the coffin he has purchased, its water-repelling varnish, its stainless-steel screws, its zinc handles.
After fifteen minutes McAdoo takes a breather, dripping sweat. “The ground seems to be a mite easier,” he says to Wylie. “See if she shovels.” McAdoo drops down beside me; Wylie seizes a spade and enthusiastically digs.
I tell Shorty I ought to be going.
“Can’t leave now. Not before the service. Wylie’d take it bad.”
“Your service has nothing to do with me; I didn’t know Miles Easton from Adam. I came this morning for one reason – because I’m paid to collect your stories. Seeing you’re occupied, I have no reason to stay.”
“You just rest easy,” says McAdoo, patting my knee. “Presently we’ll have us a few drinks. Send Miles off in grand style.”
I get to my feet and start dusting off my clothes. “I’ll see you tomorrow – if tomorrow’s convenient.”
Shorty grabs a fistful of my pant leg, a hard, mineral glint in his eyes. “It ain’t convenient,” he says.
Shorty McAdoo means it. “Okay, I’ll stay. But you owe me some Indians for this one.”
Now he has his way, his face relaxes a little. “What kind of Indian would you like me to serve you up? Tame or wild?”
“Wild, naturally.”
“Hell, I wouldn’t waste no wild Indian on you,” says Shorty. “Those wild Indians the army used to jail for scampering off the reservation, directly they was locked up, they shrivelled and died. Wild Indian got to run free. I’d guess you lock a wild Indian up between the covers of a book, same thing is going to befall him. He’s going to die.”
“Don’t get too deep on me, Shorty.”
“Hell, if I was a puddle and you stood in it, you wouldn’t get your soles wet. That’s how deep I am.”
The grave is getting deeper. Wylie has taken it down six inches.
“Then I’ll have to settle for a tame one. For the time being.”
“I knew a middle-aged bachelor name of Harp Lewis married himself a tame Indian. Got her out of a reservation school run by a Methodist preacher,” says McAdoo cheerfully.
“Just a minute,” I tell him. “Let me get my note pad and pencil out.”
“Went to this Methodist and told him he was on the lookout for a likely wife, could the preacher recommend one of his girls? Methodist told Harp to come back in a week for an answer, so’s the preacher could take it to the Lord. Preacher took it to his wife and the Lord, seemed the two were in agreement. When Harp come back in a week’s time, Methodist told him he had but one girl he’d recommend as suitable for a white man, Ruth Big Head. Not much to look at – but housebroke. Preacher’s wife took Harp to the schoolhouse and gave him a peek at her through the window. She was a good, straight, strong girl but pocked and pitted some from the smallpox. Of course that wasn’t going to put Harp off – he must have been crowding fifty and he knew he wasn’t the answer to any woman’s prayers. Things were falling into order. Old Harp Lewis coming along just then wanting a woman was fortunate for the Methodists because they’d educated this girl up to where they didn’t want her marrying one of her own kind. Christian Indian girls generally backslid and went weedy if they took a buck for a husband. And Ruth Big Head was the biggest success these Methodists had ever had with a squaw and they didn’t want their good work dashed. They’d taught her how to bake and sew and wash floors and keep a garden and milk a cow and read her Bible and sing hymns. They told Harp she was as fine a Christian girl as you could shake out of a tree in Boston. ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Harp. ‘I’ll take her.’ And he did. He gave her father five horses for her, and the Methodist forty dollars for mission work and another ten to marry them.
“Harp oughtn’t have had no complaints. What them Methodists said about Ruth was gospel truth. They’d trained the Indian out of her so that most any of the white women in those parts could have took a lesson from her on proper deportment and staying sober. She kept a fine house. Kept herself neat as a pin – always wore a starched sunbonnet and a clean apron. Couldn’t keep her out of a church or stop her praying. She was a purely upstanding Indian but for one particular. You couldn’t get a pair of Christian shoes on her feet. She couldn’t abide them. Said they bit her feet like a dog. Wore nothing but moccasins.
“Now Harp was one of those fellers who are mindful how they stand in the community and he took it hard his wife wouldn’t wear shoes. It shamed him his wife should pull up just that much short of civilized. When neighbours called on the Lewises to pay a visit, all the time Harp would be watching them to see if their eyes didn’t go straying to his woman’s feet. They were married twenty years and every present he bought her – birthday, anniversary, Christmas – was a new pair of shoes. And every new pair of shoes she carted off to the church and put in the relief box for China. Old Harp Lewis must have put new mail-order shoes on many a China Lily.
“It was just in the matter of shoes she didn’t satisfy. Harp had six kids off of her and people said they was the most mannerly, politest kids you could wish for. And people give her the credit for the raising of them, too. Of course, she had such a reputation as a righteous Christian by then it slipped folks’ minds she was an Indian. They overlooked the facts, you might say. Harp, who wasn’t much given to darkening the door of a church, used to say he was the heathen in the family. But he weren’t. There weren’t but one Indian in the Lewis clan.
“Winter of 1910 or thereabouts, Harp come down with the pneumonia. He was an old man by then, in his seventies, coughed the life out of himself. Ruth Lewis tended him and prayed over him day and night for a week. Hardly slept, hardly ate, end of it looked like a brown ghost. When Harp died she closed his eyes and walked out of the room. No weeping, no wailing. Her oldest boy give her a few minutes to be alone with her grief and then followed after. Found her in the kitchen. She’d already sawed the little finger on her left hand off with a butcher knife. Blood all over. She was working on the little finger on the right when her son came in. Halfway through the bone.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say.
“I think she was a Crow,” says Shorty. “Crows’ll do that when family dies, take a piece of flesh off themselves as a sign of mourning. Finger, piece of muscle, flesh for flesh. The preacher threw a roaring fit about it, reminded Mrs. Lewis the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that what she done to the temple was wrong, unholy wrong. She didn’t buy it. He might as well have tried to talk her out of her moccasins, for all the effect it had. Wouldn’t admit a speck of wrong or harm in what she done. She didn’t wear no shoes to Harp’s funeral either.” He pauses. “She gave old Harp two fingers for love. And she was a tame Indian. Makes you wonder.”
Working in shifts, we get the grave dug by early afternoon and return to the bunkhouse. Shorty builds a fire in the stove and heats some water. We all have a good wash and, after, Shorty and Wylie shave with McAdoo’s straight razor. Wylie’s shirt has a torn sleeve so McAdoo gives him a clean one of his to wear and then slaps the dust out of Easton’s trousers with a broom until he judges him presentable for a funeral. Then he tells Wylie to sit on the bed and keep out of his way while he fries us some bacon, onions, and potatoes. We are halfway through dinner when a gritty rattle shakes the bunkhouse in a spasm of wind. Shorty looks up from his plate, listens. Another sharp gust follows, flying grit pings on the single windowpane, and a trembling hum fills the bunkhouse as the wind ebbs in a slow, sobbing withdrawal.
“It sounds like it’s turning dirty out there.” Shorty pushes away his plate. “Soon as I dress, we best go.” He retrieves a box from under his bed, and takes out of it a black frock coat, the kind of coat nobody has worn since the turn of the century. The coat turns him angular, turns his shoulders and elbows sharper, his face more harshly lined, his eyes more unflinching. He becomes a daguerreotype from the last century, one of those stern, severe faces that their descendants can feel weighing them across the chasm of years, judging them small, insignificant, unworthy people.
“Comb your hair,” says McAdoo to Wylie.
We go out bareheaded. Wylie, his hair glistening with water, his rooster-tail dabbed down with a bit of soap, McAdoo with a coil of rope in each hand. A hot wind claps a burning hand over my mouth and nose robbing me of breath. In the slack, sallow sky the sun burns wanly behind a veil of blowing dirt. Tumbleweed bowls by and the low brush heaves and surges all about us. We lean into the wind and push it like a stalled vehicle, slowly, one step at a time, past the ruined house and up the slope to the waiting coffin, our hands shielding our eyes.
McAdoo demonstrates how to buck the coffin into the grave, a rope through each of the corner casket handles on the diagonal. When the wind suddenly drops, we can hear the casket knocking the sides of the grave, creaking and groaning, the handles threatening to tear loose. Trying to brake the last couple feet of drop, the hemp sears my palms and I almost get jerked into the hole. The coffin lands with a hollow bang. McAdoo swears, peers into the grave.
“It’s all right,” he shouts, making himself heard above the wind. “She held together.”
We thrust our shovels into the heaped ground, filling the grave. When we lift them, the dirt blows off the blades in tawdry streamers, whipping into our faces. The very air is flavoured with earth. It coats my lips and teeth, I taste it souring in the back of my throat, feel it rawly scratching in my eyes. Everywhere dust is lapping and pluming the land, moving toward the horizon like the creeping, ragged smoke of wholesale destruction. McAdoo stiff-backed in his black coat, Wylie with the burial ropes knotted in his hands, and me. Three figures ghostly and obscure in the shifting, earthly smoke.
So begins the interment of Miles Easton, with a grey smudge rolling across the landscape, edging into the sky like a nasty stain. With this and a memory of the grief of that other stranger, of the funerary rites of a Crow woman, who cut a part of herself away to join whatever she had lost.
The wake lasts past midnight, past a bottle and a half of whisky. Wylie Easton lies collapsed on one of the bunk beds. He has cried himself into a drunken sleep, racking sobs and rage. Now his mouth hangs innocently open like a slumbering child’s, his chest rising serenely and falling softly. Outside the wind is drumming against the bunkhouse like a stormy sea against a breakwater. McAdoo has lit a coal fire and left the stove door open for the light it throws, a pulsing illumination which, like the wind, billows and recedes. We are both far gone in drink and strange melancholy reveries. I keep remembering last night and Rachel. McAdoo and I haven’t spoken in half an hour and scarcely moved except to reach down to the bottle between us on the floor, to swig from it and carefully replace it on its spot. For the first time, I see on McAdoo’s face the brutal, haunted look which marked it on the film clip at Chance’s house.
He drains the dregs of the bottle, sets it down on the floor, topples it with a push of a finger. The bottle rolls across the temporary silence in the room; the wind is in a lull.
“Dead soldier,” says McAdoo and jabs at it with his toe. It rolls some more.
I feel like shit. My leg is throbbing with that old, familiar, sick, steady ache. I happen to be carrying a bag of marijuana Rachel gave me for my birthday. She said when the pain in my leg got too bad to use it. When I put it in my pocket this morning I thought I would be using it for other reasons, but now I think the time has come to roll myself some relief. McAdoo watches me.
“You ever use this?” I ask, lighting up.
“There ain’t much I ain’t used in my time – or used me. Pass it on.”
I hand him the bag and ease smoke out of my lungs. “Vipah,” I intone to the glowing end of the joint.
“I spent a winter in Mexico once,” Shorty says. “I smoked more of this than ever I smoked tobacco that winter. I preferred it to that Mexicali liquor shit, worm in the bottle.”
“You’ve been around. Seen some things,” I say, encouraging him to talk.
“I seen some things,” he agrees in an expressionless voice. I wonder if he isn’t seeing them again, wonder if his eyes aren’t directed inward, directed back in time. They are hooded, secretive. He puts the twist of reefer in his mouth, sucks deeply. We sit holding the smoke captive in our lungs, McAdoo so still he hardly seems human in the light of the banked fire.
“You’ve done some things,” I say again, prompting.
“I done some things.” His eyes meet mine. Suddenly, the pool of ruddy light in which we huddle acquires the privacy, the intimacy of a confessional box, drawing us closer together, making us one against the shadows in the room, one against whatever they might obscure and shelter.
I nudge him on. “Christ, Shorty, it’s been a long day. Don’t send me home empty-handed.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Give me a few wild Indians.”
“You’re a driving man, Vincent.”
“That old world’s gone. You can bring it back for us. Raise it up like Lazarus from the dead.”
“Preacher Vincent,” he says.
The wind moves outside, dark and elemental, like the life I imagine the man before me has lived. For an instant, I hungrily grasp at the wilderness McAdoo holds clutched inside him, not for Chance’s sake, but because of my need.
“Tell me,” I whisper.
Just then Easton stirs on his cot. He rises up on his elbow and stares at us with a sleep-blinded face. “Shorty, Shorty,” he calls, like a child waking lost in a strange bed.
“I’m here, Wylie. Go back to sleep. It’s all taken care of,” says McAdoo soothingly.
Wylie sinks back down on the bed. We listen to the slow steady breath of sleep move like a sweeping broom in the pauses of the wind.
McAdoo turns his face back to me. “I’m taking him to Canada with me. It’s his best chance. I been to Canada,” he says. His voice changes, as if he is speaking out of a cavern. A cavern of regret, or sorrow. “I went Indian up in Canada.”
“You mean you lived with Indians there?”
For a minute, he doesn’t speak. I sense the dumb misery of an animal gnawing its leg in a trap.
“Here’s where you go Indian.” He puts a finger to his temple. “Up in your head. Indian is a way of thinking. Lots of them Eastern boys riding at the studios play at cowboys and Indians. They learned Indians reading those boys’ books – maybe same kind of book you asking me to help you write – books tell you how to do sign language, show you how to chip an arrowhead with a deer horn, make a war bonnet out of turkey feathers. Books don’t make an Indian. It’s country makes an Indian.”
“How does country make an Indian?” I ask quietly. “Tell me.”
He reaches out with his boot and closes the door of the stove. The light in the room shrinks to a few bright slivers threading through the dampers. The glowing end of the reefer travels up to his face and flares there. The cavernous eyes, the stark cheekbones. His voice hard, deliberate, distant. “Five months I went alone out there. Never spoke a word to a soul. Kill your meat and find your water. No coffee, no tea, nary a lump of sugar. Ever know a white man went five months without bread, or biscuits, or beans? I done it.
“I’d soured on folks, wanted shut of them, but lonesome country breeds lonesomeness. I sung every song I knew trying to drown out the Indian talking in my head. Every day I heard him plainer and plainer. The country done it to me. The sky was Indian sky, the wind was Indian wind, every last thing I laid my eyes on was cut to fit an Indian.
“I taken myself away from my own kind; I’d sickened on white folks. I seen a sign of them, seen bull teams, seen freight wagons, I hid. Only trail I followed was animal trail. I seen a hawk, I followed the hawk. Hawk passed me on to a deer, I followed the deer. Deer tipped his horns to the sun, I followed the sun. I rode forty miles some days, east, west, north, south, I wasn’t bound for any particular place. Watered my horse in the Frenchman, the Saskatchewan, the Oldman, the Bow, the Big Muddy. I covered some ground. Kept moving.”
My pencil is moving under cover of darkness, too, scratching out a story offered under cover of darkness. I turn the pages of the notebook quietly, marching my shorthand across the paper by feel. My eyes grow accustomed to the dark; I dimly make out the old man on his chair, head held upright, the reefer steady now, its bright point hung down the side of the chair.
“Lived that way for a month, went sick. Suffered the bone ache and fever, the bloody shits. One day I found myself squatting by a buffalo wallow, buck naked and white as peeled willow. Looked up and saw a four-o’clock sun, didn’t know how it got there. Didn’t know where my clothes was. Heard myself… singing. Next I knew, it was night. Standing out in the bare prairie in the middle of the most godawful storm you ever seen, but now my clothes had climbed back on me. Thunder booming and the sky cracking like a bad plaster wall, booming so hard your ears near bleed, yellow-green cracks of fire running ceiling to floorboards, whole world shaking and burning like a house falling down around your head, timbers snapping, floor giving way under your feet, roof buckling.
“Two balls of ground lightning come rolling towards me, skipping and flaring over the short grass, crackling, jumping like drops of water in a hot skillet. The hair on me jumps up straight all around my head, I lift my hands to cover my eyes to shut out what’s a-going to blast me to Kingdom Come… there’s a hovering blue light all around them hands… like sundogs circling round the sun. I feel myself lifting, boots dangling above the ground.
“Sky opens up. Rain drives me back down, knocks me side to side, pounds me so hard it’s going to tear the rags I’m wearing right off me, shred and peel them off my bones like wet newspaper. Can’t catch my breath the rain’s driving down so hard, I’m breathing rain. She’s like standing in a fast-running river, white water boiling over my head, and on the banks of this here stream, big old green tree trunks of lightning are waving in a white wind, forking their roots down into the ground to reach the very hubs of hell.
“Of a sudden I’m stinging all over, cold bees are at me. Hail. She’s making a sound like a scythe cutting grass, blood roaring through your head. There ain’t no cover but my horse. I throw my coat over his head and duck under his belly. The stones are drumming on him and he begins to squeal like a stuck pig, you never heard the like of it.
“God knows how long I listen to that squealing. I squat under him with my arms wrapped around my head to shut out the sound of it, just rocking back and forth. Then, all of a sudden like, she’s hushed, dead quiet. The scythe’s done cutting, the blood’s done roaring. No more lightning, no more thunder. I can feel the cold rising off the ground, see the pale ice steaming. I come out from under that horse on all fours. I crawl. Don’t know where I’m going, don’t care. Hail’s crunching like broken glass, biting into my knees. Everywhere’s white and frozen, mist smoking off the ground and me creeping through it, sweating fever and fear, bawling like a baby. I creep and crawl, looking for a hidey-hole to worm myself into, some place to curl. Then my limbs won’t carry me no more and down I drops on my face in the hail, me mumbling into the ice and the thunder muttering off in the distance.
“I wake round dawn, the sky apple-green and me nigh right in the head, but wet and chilled and shaky. I suspicion laying in the hail drew the fever out of me. Only now I ain’t laying in hail I’m laying in melt-water. Slathered in mud. I pick myself up out of the muck and look for my horse. No horse. He’s made tracks with my saddle and my rifle.
“There’s a blow of black despair for you. I sink back down into the mud, can’t pick myself out of that wallow. I’m whipped.
“The sun keeps climbing, the mud dries stiff on my face, my hands, my hair, my clothes. And I just sit, can’t rouse myself. Until I hear horses. Good Lord, maybe I been saved. I look up from studying the mud caked on my trouser legs and what do I see? Three Indian bucks making towards me on their ponies.
“I shake myself up then, by the Jesus, shake myself up and go for my pistol. But there ain’t no pistol to hand. All that capering the night before jogged it loose and it’d gone missing somewheres. I cast about every which way but all I see is puddles with sunshine slanting off them, hail-beat grass, and mud-holes. No Colt. The only weapon stands between me and those Indians is a knife.
“They’re on me now. Rein their ponies up in my face and investigate me Indian-fashion – poker-faced and solemn. I must’ve been a study. Raggedy-ass white man in clothes a beggar of a fort Indian wouldn’t wore. Hair all matted and twisted up in mud like a mop, rest of me crusted over with a acre’s worth of God’s good earth.
“They was right handsome boys, all done up for a party, paint and feathers. The one I figured for the leader of this expedition was straight as a gun barrel, a fall of that blue-black Indian hair hanging down to the small of his back, half his face painted yellow and the other half red, necklace of brass bells hung round his neck that went tinkle-tinkle every time his horse pawed the ground.
“He points to me, says something to his friends in Indian gab. The way they laugh ain’t encouraging. He shoulders his pony into me and taps my hair with his quirt. In a big, loud voice he puts what I take to be a question. I’m guessing something along the lines of, What you doing spoiling my air and my scenery?
“By the Christ, thinks I, by the Christ. These lads are Blackfoot. I’d heard plenty of how they done woodhawks and hunters along the Missouri. They didn’t leave no pretty corpses. Lot of dead men with their own dicks stuffed in their mouths.
“Red and Yellow Face gives me another flick with his quirt and makes some remark to his boys that sets them laughing fit to bust a gut. I suspicion what’s funny is me plastered in hog muck. Man’ll do most anything to save his precious skin and I did. Down I goes on hands and knees, sticks my rump in the air, lets loose a squeal to wake snakes, and starts rooting like a pig in his pen. Lord, the look on those Indians’ faces. They’d never seen the like. But when the surprise slid off them they howled with laughter. That was a favourable sign. Nobody likely to murder you when they’re laughing at you.
“Old Red and Yellow Face was pointing at me and saying the same word over and over. The other two kept nodding their heads yes, yes, every time he said it. I speculate Old Red and Yellow Face was a man of the world, been to the white man’s forts, seen his pigs. Every time he said the word, I nodded and grinned and grunted all the louder. I even pitched myself in a good-sized mud-hole and rolled for him, wriggled on my back, all four trotters up in the air. Your Indian’s got a natural contempt for the pig, but this was right up their alley, watching a white man do pork proud.
“What they didn’t know I was up to, rooting through the slop on my hands and knees, wiggling my hams, was I was looking for that revolver of mine. Playing pig got my snout close to the ground. And when I found that Colt, I aimed to knock Red and Yellow Face and his brethren off their ponies like they was turkeys setting on a rail fence.
“So I kept oinking, and praying, Please God let me lay hands on that gun. Once or twice I thought the boys might be losing interest so I sat up on my haunches like a fat old boar and made windy, wet farts with my lips, or flopped my hands up alongside my head like they was pig ears. When they was roaring with joy I’d get back on the hustle again, covering ground looking for the Colt, the Indians heeling their horses behind me, not wanting to miss nothing.
“My spell of sickness had weakened me considerable though. Wasn’t long before I was feeling mighty dogged out, but I says to myself, Keep moving, you got to keep moving until you get that gun. Over and over I said it. And that’s what I done, went on sinking my wrists in gumbo, the mud sucking the strength out of me, leaving my arms so wearisome heavy it was all I could do to pull them free. Keep moving, I said, you got no hope but that gun.
“Everything squeezing in, your eyes begging for a flash of shiny metal, and this noise in your head like a saw whining through wood. And that’s the sound of your own breath, but you got to keep moving, keep moving. Your eyes start to haze, like blood dripping into water, one drop at a time, each drop spreading, and the water going misty, then cloudy, then bright, until there ain’t nothing but bright blood, and then you get a new notion – that that noise is the sound of a saw chewing through your heart, the blood spurting deep down in you with every stroke, slowly inching up in you until you drown in it, drown in your own heart’s blood.
“And I did. I drowned. Keeled over. Sank. I had strength but for one thing, fumble for that knife in my boot top. Pick away, pick away went my fingers but they wouldn’t close on it. Then I knew it was all over. Just lay there panting, hog waiting to be butchered. Lay with my face in the mud and waited for them to come, do what they done to those woodhawks on the Missouri, cut me down to size one piece at a time.
“It was unholy still. A still kin to the still of an empty house, but bigger and stranger. Empty world, it said. I waited. Nothing come. I rolled over, staggered to my feet. I’d have swore there weren’t another soul in a hundred miles. Indians was gone, like smoke in a wind.
“Couple of hours I walked in circles looking for my pistol. Where there’s three Indians could be more. Found my hat. Found a dead prairie chicken laying where the hail had killed it. Sight of that, hunger came over me so fierce I pulled the feathers off it, ate it raw where I stood. It’d been one long stretch since I’d took food.
“Found my hat, found the chicken, but never found the Colt. When candle-lighting come, I turned south and tramped for the border. Walked like a dead man. Walked all night. Sun rose and I found the third thing, my horse stepping south too.”
There is a long pause. I hear him suck at the reefer but no light shows; it has gone out in his fingers. I lift my pencil from the paper but he starts to talk again, his voice no longer deliberate and hard, but mournful and echoing like it had begun.
“Them old-timey, genuine Indians used to go off solitary in the wilderness so’s to find their creature spirit,” he says. “That’s where they learned it, in the wilderness.”
I ask what he means by creature spirit.
“Creature spirit,” he reiterates. “Spirit they shared with some creature – grizzly spirit, elk spirit, coyote spirit, crow spirit. Hardship and the country taught them it.” There is another pause. “What you make of mine?”
“Your what?”
“You ain’t been listening, have you?” he says.
The next morning I type up a transcription of the interviews. In the end, I send only the last one because it has about it the ring of naked honesty that Chance is after. I believe it marks progress, shows how McAdoo, under my prompting, is slowly moving nearer and nearer to what we are seeking – the truth.
That night as I am getting ready for bed a knock comes at my door. There is a note from Chance by messenger. The note reads:
Dear Harry,
A picture about a lunatic lost on the plains is not what I had in mind. Press him about Indian wars.
Sincerely,
Damon Ira Chance