A dozen of the Union men, all in their underwear, had escaped to the rise where the cannon was parked. They were fetching things from a wagon, making no attempt to stiver off, and I thought they had lost their heads. Then their gun started up and I knew why they hadn’t run.
One aimed it while others worked to feed it or watched the flanks and the gun was popping so fast it was like twenty men shooting at once.
Some Cherokees made a charge on horseback and then there was a second charge. The gun had not stopped firing since it started and Shaw and Fisk and I hunkered in some scraggly brush on the other side of the meadow. The Federals were on a rise directly across from us and in the grass below were dozens of trampled tents and dead and dying men and horses and the sound of moaning like a cattle auction.
They ran out of targets. They began to work over the wounded. The moon was bright and Fisk shot a man standing near the gun and then the branches overtop of us were swaying and crackling and Shaw said, “Leon’s hit,” and went quiet.
There would be a shot from our side and the Federals would see the flash and put twenty or thirty rounds in and get their credit. Shaw’s face was dark and I reached for Fisk. He was wet. One of the Cherokees broke cover but the gun caught him, then came back to me. I pushed up against a rock no bigger than a saddletree and the bullets were slapping against it, something punched my arm, my face was stinging, and then they were working the bushes over my head. The ground all around me was flat and open and I knew my medicine had run out. I tried to remember the death song. I’d forgotten it.
The gun stopped again. Flying Jacket was yelling something. I looked for a ditch or rock or dead horse. There was a flipped wagon but it was too far, and there was an Indian behind the wagon shooting his bow nearly straight up, and then more Indians were doing the same and the air above the gun began to shilly and waver, as if there were heat from a great fire. The loaders were shrieking and calling out and then all the Indians were shooting and the gunner was alone firing blindly into the dark.
THE CHEROKEES WERE moving among the tents, finishing off the wounded with clubs. There was an occasional shot farther down the valley.
I bandaged my arm, then I found Busque and Showalter. We went to the gun. The ground around it was stuck with hundreds of arrows—the Indians had shot them almost straight up so that they would fall on the Federals from above and there were scattered bodies with the switches sticking into them at strange angles, into the tops of their shoulders and heads.
One of the bodies began to move. A man slid out from under it. He appeared to be unhurt.
“I surrender,” he said. He held up his hands. “Are you bandits?”
“We’re with the Confederate States of America,” I told him.
He looked at us strangely. Then he said: “I’m a civilian. I’m a sales representative.”
Busque said: “What does that even mean?”
“I represent the Gatling company. We’re not under contract with the army, but we offered a few production samples for their use, as I . . . as I believe we had difficulty contacting your government.”
The remaining Cherokees were beginning to gather.
“How does that gun work?” said Busque.
“It’s actually very simple. You take a standard paper cartridge, insert it into this carrier . . .” He picked up a small metal cylinder from the ground, where hundreds or thousands were littered. “The cartridge and carrier unit then fit into this hopper at the top of the gun, like so.”
Flying Jacket had come up.
“Who is he,” he asked. “A deserter?”
“He works for the company that made the gun. He says he is a salesman.”
Flying Jacket cocked his head as if thinking. He said something to his men. Six or eight of them rushed forward and stabbed the sales representative to death.
THE INDIANS ATTEMPTED to take the gun apart so that it couldn’t be used again. But they couldn’t make sense of it in the dark and instead began to bash it with rocks.
Flying Jacket took me aside and led me to the other wagons, where a crate had been pried open.
“This is heavy but it does not look like gold. It looks like wheat.”
“That’s gold dust,” I said. “That is gold for sure.”
“There is a lot of it.”
“How much?”
“Hundreds of sacks like that one. Hundreds at least.”
The sack looked to be about two pounds.
“We’ll have to bury some of it and come back later.”
“Why?” he said.
“It’ll be tough to move it all.”
He looked at me.
“What?”
“Eli, did the sight of that gun not convince you of anything?”
“No.”
“I believe that you are not telling the truth. Did you know of the existence of this type of gun?”
“Not exactly.”
“So you did.”
“I didn’t know they were in production.”
“But you knew the other side would eventually have them. A gun with which one man can kill forty.”
I looked off into the dark valley below us and the mountains beyond it. I wondered if we would make it home.
“Ah, Eli. Our band is nearly a thousand women, children, and old men. When we began this trip there were nearly two hundred warriors to support them. It was not enough. Now there are perhaps forty.”
“It’s a tragedy,” I said. “I am extremely sorry.”
“It is an even greater tragedy that we are on the losing side of this war. The land we have been given by the federal government, which was not very good, and which we hoped to improve by fighting, we may lose entirely. Just to see that gun fired it is clear.”
I shrugged.
“And these men! Look at how fat they are, and how good their horses, when we are starving and our horses starving as well. And the ammunition they carry . . .”
“It’s always been like this,” I said. “We were always the underdog.”
“We are done fighting,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“That is a poor decision.”
“Your government will not even exist a year from now, Eli. You are five white men . . .”
“Now three.”
“Three. I am sorry for your loss of two men, but when this war is over, you three will be able to do whatever you like. But I will be stuck on the reservation, along with my family, paying the price for supporting the wrong side. As will all my men. Who, when they are finished burying their brothers, will likely come to the conclusion that the best action is to kill the three of you. Both because you led us to this gun, which you did not bother to tell us about, and also because when whites steal something, it is no problem—whites can steal from each other—but if Indians steal something it is another matter. Do you understand? Indians who steal gold will not be forgiven.” He shrugged. “And yet we need this gold.”
I didn’t say anything.
“This was a great battle, Eli. The last we will ever win. After this there will be only losing. And I think that if I were you, I would get off this mountain as soon as possible.”
“You’re their chief,” I said.
“Unlike your people, we are democratic. Each man is free. My word is simply advice, not law.” He patted my shoulder. “I am telling you this because you are the best white man I have ever known. The thought of you living gives me great pleasure.”
“Me too,” I said, but he ignored me.
“It will be best if you ride all day and all night, at least for the first few days.”
I turned to go. He had loaded sacks of the gold into a rawhide parfleche. “Magic will not touch you, Eli. I saw it from the first time I met you. But of course that is also a curse.” He handed me the bag.
“WHAT DO YOU think,” said Busque. Rummaging in the moonlight, he and Showalter had each found a clean Union uniform, which was not hard to do as most of the bluecoats had died in their underwea
r. They packed the uniforms into their saddlebags.
“We’re going to California,” said Showalter.
“I’ll report you as killed in action.”
“Asshole,” said Busque, “the action is over. Those bluecoat motherfuckers all had Henrys and Spencers and that fucking automatic gun. Not to mention those Yankee boots they were all wearing. I would have killed any one of them just for those boots.”
“And this fucking gold,” said Showalter. “Our guys are getting paid in scrip that’ll be worthless by the time the peaches come in.”
“I’m a colonel,” I said.
“Eli, very shortly we will have lost the greatest war in history; in fact it is possible we have lost it already, and that the news has not reached us yet. I don’t plan on being put in a Union prison camp, or shot by the Home Guard between now and then, or, even worse, dying in the final battle for a house of bullshit.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If you go back to Austin you’ll be shot for desertion. And the war will end anyway, whether you’re alive or dead. Come out west and send for your family.”
“I can’t.”
“You think we lived this long because of what great soldiers we are? Is that what you think?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re a real sonofabitch,” he said. “I always wondered about you.”
“Girls,” said Showalter, “you think these prairie niggers are gonna let us into any of that gold?”
THERE WERE OVER two hundred Union dead, mostly in their underwear. Usually the time after a fight felt like after a deer hunt, but now I began to get a terrible feeling.
Twenty-eight Cherokees had been killed outright and at sunrise, fourteen of the wounded would be shot by their friends. We buried Shaw and Fisk, whose faces were staved in. I thought of Fisk’s children, and the children of all the other men, they were all somebody’s darling.
From the supply wagons I loaded up on salt pork and cartridges for my Henry rifle. Flying Jacket allowed Busque and Showalter a bag of yellow dust apiece. They were happy and I decided not to tell them what I’d been given earlier.
His men wouldn’t look at us. They all thought we’d known about the gun and the three of us trotted off down the mountain, leaving the Cherokees with the gold and all the Federals’ weapons, ammunition, and horses. Just off the road was a dead man in his long underwear, and farther off the road, at the edge of the stream, was a second one.
I could not shake the feeling I’d stepped over some line over which I would never return, but maybe I’d crossed it years earlier, or maybe it had never existed. There was nothing you could take that did not belong to some other person. Whatever strings that held me had been cut.
“Stop fretting,” Showalter said. “As soon as the sun comes up and they see all their loot, they’ll want to take it and run. They’ll forget we exist!” He grinned at me.
“You’re probably right,” I said.
Busque stayed far ahead. He hadn’t looked at me since the burial.
AT THE BASE of the mountain, when we reached a long stretch of rock, I split off on my own, promising to see them in California when the war ended. It was the end of the RMN. I said a few words to distract from what was showing on my face.
We heard the shots as the Cherokees finished their wounded. I watched Busque and Showalter disappear to the west and then I pried the shoes off my horse and looped around the base of the mountain, staying under cover, changing direction every time I crossed a stream or patch of rock. I guessed Busque and Showalter wouldn’t be careful about their tracks. I hoped the Indians wouldn’t find them, but I knew better, the people around me did not live long, the Cherokees would catch the others, but not me, I was as sure of that as anything.
A MONTH LATER I got to Austin. The war had been over since spring.
Chapter Fifty-three
J.A. McCullough
She was a slut or a dyke or a whore. A man trapped in a woman’s body; look up her skirt and you’ll see a cock. A liar, a schemer, a cold heart with a cunt to match, ridden hard and put up wet, Though she shouldn’t take it personally. No one meant anything by it.
To be a man meant not living by any rules at all. You could say one thing in church and another at the bar and somehow both were true. You could be a good husband and father and Christian and bed every secretary, waitress, and prostitute that caught your eye. They all had their winks and nods, code for I fucked that cheerleader or nanny or Pan Am stewardess, that maid or riding instructor. Meanwhile, the slightest hint she was anything but a virgin (excepting the three children), would get her banned for life, a scarlet letter.
Not that she was complaining, but it had never stopped being strange that what was praised in men—the need to be good at everything, to be someone important—would be considered a character flaw in her. This had not been the case when Hank was alive. Perhaps they thought her ambition came from him, perhaps they did not mind a woman if she was under the control of a man.
But why did she care? Most men bored her, people bored her; she’d spent fifteen years watching Hank’s mind grow and change and constantly being surprised. She was not going to give up her freedom for anything less. In the first few years after Hank’s death, she’d slept with only a handful of men and of all of them the only one she’d fallen for was married, and as far as the others, her feelings had faded, or turned off abruptly; they were not Hank, could not be Hank. Most nights, if she had the energy, she reached for her massager and fell asleep.
Yes, she was jealous, there were two sets of rules, a man could have mistresses and abortions, sleep with every cheerleader on the Dallas Cowboys . . . to be free that way, to do whatever you wanted, though it was not just about being free, it was about being desired. No matter how old, fat, or ugly you were—you were desired nonetheless. She could not think about it without feeling like a failure, as if she had to live her life in a sort of cage, a narrow and particular path, watching the others sprint about like a pack of children, or dogs, breaking the rules, going in circles, this way and that.
She was not a prude. She’d used a few men for sex, or tried to, but each time it was less than she wanted, it was something half-complete, and even men did not not enjoy being treated that way, no matter what they told their friends, you acted like I was some kind of vibrator, one had told her, they were sensitive creatures, monsters and sensitive creatures, they were whatever they wanted to be.
AND YET THEY had begun to accept her. They were all getting old, they were all getting rich, she didn’t know, but they had begun to treat her like the lady who’d been on the cover of Time, the woman you should have known way back, when she was a looker, a man-eater. Of course, she had never been a man-eater; of course, even at fifty, she was still striking. But that was not part of the agreement. The agreement was she was old and fat, just like them, though being old and fat did not matter for them.
Lucho Haynes invited her to his hunting camp, and she’d immediately turned him down. It was Lucho, not Clayton Williams, who’d come up with the idea of the Honey Hunt: prostitutes hired by the dozen and set out in the woods with a blanket and cooler—as a bird handler would place pheasants before a hunt—at which point Lucho and his friends would go out and find them.
She mentioned the invitation to Ted.
“Well, I doubt they’d rape you or anything,” he said. “They probably have younger girls for that.”
“Sex could be an interesting novelty,” she said.
He faked a hurt look, then went back to his magazine. “I would not mind trying it later.”
“Fat chance.”
“Well, if you are seriously interested in my opinion, I think it’s a terrible idea. They’ll figure out some way to humiliate you or it’ll happen naturally without them even planning it, because they aren’t so stupid that they can’t see what you really want.”
“Which is what?”
“To be like them,” he said. “To be accepted in
to their little club.”
“There is no club,” she said. “And if there is, I am in it.”
“I suppose that is true.”
“That is ridiculous.”
“No, you’re right. I don’t know what I was talking about.”
The next day she called Lucho and told him she was coming.
THE CAMP WAS three hours northeast of Houston, deep into the Pineywoods. There were families living in shacks, fields of wrecked farm equipment, it was as poor as Mexico, poor as the last century. In her trunk were three days’ worth of clothes and a pair of shotguns: a 28 gauge for quail, a 20 gauge if she needed something heavier, and her normal revolver under the driver’s seat.
She made her way down the sandy road, the car fishtailing the entire time. The vegetation was thick, vines hanging, smells of flowers she didn’t recognize, she thought of white sheets, her father, old longleaf pines and white oaks and magnolias a hundred feet tall. It was like going back in time, mosquitoes and dragonflies and the air so wet and heavy—it did not seem possible this was Texas.
By the time Lucho showed her to her cabin, the sun was going down and most of the men had returned from fishing or shooting. She was wearing heels and a skirt and blouse and cursing herself for forgetting the bug spray. None of the men appeared to have showered or shaved in several days. The average oilman’s ranch had a main house of limestone with heavy wood floors and leather furniture; the lodge here was a crude plank structure with stapled screen windows and unfinished walls. It might have been the hunting camp of some backwoods mayor, jury-rigged electrical cables, old refrigerators and televisions. She knew all of the men present, Rich Estes, Calvin McCall, Aubrey Stokes, T.J. Garnet, a half-dozen others, all dressed in their oldest clothes, pale legs under Bermuda shorts, bellies hanging. She had brought jeans but decided not to change—the worst thing would have been to give off the impression that she cared to fit in, to let them know how flattered she was. They were all good men, but they were the type who demanded submission.