The Thicket

  “Twain’s book on travel again. It makes me want to follow the equator. It makes me want to do anything but what I do. The drawback is money. I had money I could travel and I could buy women and I could have fine food and all the things that would be to my enjoyment. I am not saying I deserve it more than others, but I am saying I probably would like it more than others.”

  I laughed a little. “Someday you may go.”

  Shorty shook his head. “I do not think so. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking someday soon I will die on a trail like this one, or I will die at home, or on that hill where I place my telescope, and though none is any worse than any other place, if I had my pick, I would die on a great ship somewhere at sea, on the way to some foreign port, and if not that, then by the telescope, and maybe, when I think about it, that would actually be the best. I have picked my own star. It is mine. Others may have picked it, but I have claimed it for myself and will allow no others to have it. When it is visible I find it in the sky at night, and it is like a shiny eye looking directly at me. It is not God. It is not a star. It is my own self looking back at me.”

  “You sound like my sister,” I said. “She found a star for herself.”

  “Really?” Shorty said. It was a rare moment in that he showed true surprise.

  “Yeah.”

  “She sounds extraordinary.”

  “We just thought she was odd,” I said.

  “Those who see like you, see those who are sane as blind,” he said.

  “I’m sane.”

  “You are in the world, but are not part of it. Therefore, you are not sane.”

  “You think highly of yourself, don’t you?”

  “I do. I have to. I see everything from low down. It is a different way of looking at the world. Look here, kid. I do not think I act better than other men. Like the worst of them, I have killed and wasted. I helped wipe the buffalo into nearly nothing. I have killed men and been paid for the deed. But I know who I am and I know what this world is, and in spite of what you say, you are set to do the same things I have done and call it something different. You keep waving a flag of righteousness, and you talk around it, but in your own way you are as ruined as I am.”

  “Nonesense,” I said. “You get all this because you and my sister picked out a star?”

  “You should pick one of your own,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I mentioned it,” I said. “It’s just that like you, she is peculiar, but of a better heart, I can assure you of that.”

  “I will not quarrel with that. I wish I could go backwards and do it all again, and different. But I cannot. I just hope Lula can see her star. I hope during this troubling time she can look up and see it and feel that it is herself, and that if she should leave her shell she can imagine that star making her part of the halo of the world.”

  “That sounds like religion,” I said.

  “It sounds like one of the lies we tell ourselves to get by,” Shorty said. “But the difference in me and you is I know it is a lie.”

  He put the book in his lap and studied me for a moment. “Where would you like to go if there were no restrictions?”

  “What?”

  “If you could do anything in the world, go anywhere in the world, where or what would it be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not something that can happen, so why think about it?”

  “Take a moment. Where? What?”

  “Had my druthers,” I said, “I’d just soon go back to my farm and maybe have a wife and some kids and raise some crops. I don’t know it’s such a bad life, and it’s seeming better to me all the time.”

  “But if we find your men and rescue your sister, you will not have any land.”

  “You said what I’d druther. I figure me and Lula can make the best of it.”

  “What about Jimmie Sue?” he asked.

  “I think maybe she’s had too many adventures to settle down,” I said.

  “That is a polite way to express it,” he said. “But maybe she has had so many she wants to. We are not all the same, and trying to define us is like trying to determine which way a frog will jump.”

  “Toward water,” I said.

  Shorty smiled. He looked amazingly warm in that moment, like a kindly uncle about to offer you a piece of fruit. “You are so definite, kid. Seldom right, but always certain.”

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to feed the tiger. The fire crackled. We watched it. I said, “I was wondering about Sheriff Winton. How’d his face get like that?”

  Shorty placed the book on the ground and kept studying the fire. “He has not always been a sheriff. He was a bounty hunter. But before he was a bounty hunter, he tried to settle a ranch out in North Texas, which to my mind is a part of Texas they could fill in with rubble and barn-floor scrapings and it would be improved. It was then home to the Comanche, or what was left of them. Truthfully, their home was more broadly spaced than that. It is more fair to say that North Texas was one of their haunts. They moved about hunting buffalo. Nomads is what they were. This was near the end of things for them, but they did not know that yet. Or perhaps they did and were not ready to accept it. People rarely accept something even when it is looking them in the eye. And that is the way it should be. Nothing was on their side. White men were coming in droves with better weapons. The buffalo, which were the Comanche’s general store, were almost gone. But still, the Comanche were formidable.

  “Settlers kept coming and the Comanche pushed back. They pushed back hard. I was tracking a bounty up that way. I had known Winton before. We had hunted buffalo ourselves, for the hides. It was a purely nasty and smelly business, and to be honest, I could not do it now. I could not shoot those buffalo as I did then. I have come to think it is man that should be shot and animals to be left alone. But I did it. I skinned them and left their meat to rot on the prairies. I sometimes took meat for myself, or a buffalo tongue, which when prepared right is tasty, but mostly they rotted. It was too much for me. I quit the work and moved on.

  “Winton stayed in the North Texas country. He met a gal. She was, between you and me, as ugly as sin and as contrary as a rattlesnake. She was so damn ugly she would have to sneak up on a biscuit and force it to be eaten with the point of a gun. She was long-faced and skinny and thin of nose—so much, in fact, it could have been removed and used as a sewing needle. She had lips like the stitches on a deerskin coat. But he loved her and they had a child. I had heard tell of that, his having become a father.

  “I was passing that way in pursuit of a bounty, which I had lost track of and never did find. That is one of a few that got away from me. But got away he did, and to my knowledge was never arrested. His name was James Plant and I was after him for the murder of a storekeeper. It was said he killed that man because of something said to his niece or some such. I do not remember. Many thought he was innocent of anything besides killing a skunk. But it did not matter to me. He was money on the hoof, and I went after him. As I said, he got away. I have heard over the years that he moved up north and made good of himself, and has been in no other trouble, but I cannot verify any of that information. What I can verify is what happened to Winton.

  “I come to his place of the evening, and I yelled out from a distance who I was, and Winton came outside and greeted me and let me in. His wife—and this was the first time I had met her, though I knew much about her from Winton—looked at me like I was some sort of weed. The child, who was three or so, was amazed at my size and saw me as a playmate. I was forced into games of piggybacking her and sitting on the floor and playing all manner of competition with cards and checkers, none of which she truly knew how to play. I must say that I enjoyed it in spite of myself. The little girl was charming. She did not judge me at all. She was merely impressed with my smallness, my uniqueness. I ended up staying a few days, and it was not long that Winton’s old lady, Sarah was her name, came to accept me as well. And I came to like her. I think she was eyeing me with a bi
t of curiosity, as to what it might be like to have me mount her. That may sound as if I think a lot of myself, but I assure you that was the impression I got, and I do think a lot of myself. I also knew one thing for a fact. Sarah had once upon a time been a sporting girl, which did not surprise me. Winton was not the sort that would meet a future wife at the opera. But I, of course, was not interested. Had she been willing and not Winton’s wife, then I could have got past that face, which was like a hatchet to the soul. But that is what eyelids are for, to shield you from sights hard to bear. However, nothing happened between me and her. What happened was much worse.

  “You see, come early morning that little girl got up and went outside, because there was a new calf she wanted to see, and before it was good light, the Comanche had pulled the sneak. They were right up on that house and had already cut the throat of the hogs and cattle and had even arrowed the dog from a distance, so there was not a bark of warning. They were planning on stealing the horses, and that is when the little girl slipped outside, and they nabbed her. They did not get their hand over her mouth in time, and she screamed.

  “Sarah, as a mother will do, if she is worth her salt, sprang to her feet and was out the door before we could grab a gun, and then we heard her scream, too. By the time we were outside with the rifles, all we could see were the Comanche riding off, Sarah slung over a saddle, and the little girl out of sight, but we could hear her caterwauling. She was yelling, “Papa, Papa,” over and over. It was the sort of thing that could tear your heart out and boil it.

  “Now, they had killed all the livestock except the horses, but when they nabbed the child and Sarah and we come out with guns, they made for the distance. It was not because they were afraid but because they had already punished Winton for trying to live on their land and raise livestock. The horses they had meant to steal, but it ended up that they only scattered them. It took us over an hour to rustle up a couple of the horses, get them saddled, and get ourselves dressed. Mind you, we chased those cayuses all over the plains in our bare feet and underwear, toting a rifle.

  “So we were mounted and armed, and we set out after them. A Comanche is an unpredictable bird is what he is. Sometimes he will take a woman and make her part of the tribe, but that is generally for the younger ones that can be raised as a Comanche. Sometimes disease or war parties of other tribes, sometimes even other branches of the Comanche, can steal or kill their women. Sometimes, to make sure there are more of their tribe, they steal women to have children. When it gets right down to it, the Comanche are a mixed group of Indians—lots of white blood and other Indian blood, and colored, and so on. What makes a Comanche is less about blood than how he lives. Considering on the fact that they would often do that sort of thing, take whites to be part of their tribe, I tried to keep a hopeful mind-set. It was something I could say to Winton, who was almost in a state of wildness akin to a rabid raccoon. This would work against him.”

  Shorty turned and looked in the direction of where Winton lay sleeping.

  “I knew it could quite easily go in the other direction. That they could take a whim to do just the opposite. A Comanche can be vengeful one second and give you food and a buffalo robe the next, though they are not quick to give away a horse. Horses are their survival. They are great horsemen.

  “An Apache prefers to be on foot. The Apache see a horse as a tool. They will ride on until it is tired, and then they will ride it some more. If it falls over they will build a fire up against it to make it stand back up until it can stand no longer, and then they will eat it. The Comanche are not like that. They talk to horses. On the ground the Comanche are a bowlegged ugliness, but on horseback, it is as if they and the horse are one, a centaur.

  “I have strayed from my story and how Winton came to look the way he does. It was anger and love that got the better of him, and already being skeptical of love, from that day on I avoided it even more than before, as it can lead one into foolishness.

  “We followed them. It was a hard go. From the tracks, Winton determined we were closing in on them. The Comanche must have determined a similar thing, for they did a bit of business to slow us down. We were so close we could hear the baby crying in the distance. A plaintive wail if there ever was one, and it grew in sound as we went, and before long it was a caterwauling.”

  It was here that Shorty hesitated in his story. The night seemed tight around us, like we had been dunked inside a bag. I felt a little dizzy. I had been holding my breath.

  Shorty let his own breath out as if it were his last, and that hard look on his face turned soft in the firelight.

  “There were some brush areas that we came to. There were thorns on some of the brush. Big thorns, like nails. We could see where something had been dragged through the brush. Then we found bits of the baby’s clothes that had been ripped off by the brush, and we saw then something shiny in the sunlight, white as snow streaked with wet clay. It was neither snow nor clay. They had sharpened one of the limbs of the brush, and the baby was on that sharp stick. They had stuck her through the belly, and that, of course, had been what all the horrible screeching had been about. They had dragged her by rope through the thorns before they stuck her, and impaled the poor darling in such a way the child could not wiggle off. If it had, it wouldn’t have mattered. The wound was horrid enough to insure its death.”

  “The monsters,” I said.

  “They are humans,” said Shorty. “So therefore your word is accurate.”

  “Human?” I said. “There is nothing human about something like that.”

  “I have known of men to rape and murder Indians with the easy understanding that they are not quite human. I am sure that Eustace can tell you unpleasant and accurate stories about how colored are treated by white men, so I will not defend either white man, Indian, or colored against their basic nature. I hate them all evenly, including myself. No use expecting more from humans than they are capable of. I guess I should not hate them all, as it is akin to hating water for being wet or dust for being dry. But I do nonetheless, and sometimes with a certain pride.”

  Shorty paused, pulled himself back to his story.

  “The obvious thing is, the child slowed us down. We removed it from the sharpened stick. There was no more crying by that time, though the baby was alive. We made a shade of a horse blanket by throwing it over a brush, and laid the child under it. Did what we could for it, which was essentially nothing. The child died near nightfall, never having really come around, having bled out, even though we stuffed the wound with leaves and some handkerchiefs. It was like trying to mop up the Gulf of Mexico with a jar of cotton balls. We dug a place with our hands under the blanket and put the child down there. We took the blanket and put it back on the horse. Then we rode after them. It was night, and I attempted to encourage Winton to wait, but he would have none of it. In our haste my horse hit a chuck hole, fell, broke its leg, and I had to cut its throat to keep things as silent as we could.

  “Winton would not let me ride double, fearing it would slow down his progress, so he went ahead. It was not like here, with all the trees. It was mostly a stretch of clear land with occasional brush. Winton foolishly went ahead, and I went after him, carrying my rifle and wearing my sidearm. I, of course, soon lost sight of him. I rested very little. Stopping now and again, catching a few minutes of sleep here and there, but mostly I walked and walked until my feet hurt and there were blisters on my heels the size of boiled eggs.

  “Finally the light came and I could easily see the tracks of Winton’s horse mingled among the tracks of the Comanche ponies. Winton should have known he was being led into a trap, but he was too blind with anger. They were making it easy for us to follow, and a little later on I saw they were adding to Winton’s anger. His tracks led to a draw that dipped down into the land, and there was a stream running there, so small and weak of flow it was more like the run from a snotty nose than a real stream. The draw itself was enough to grab some shade, though, and I walked down in
it, and leaned against a cool wall to escape the rising heat of the day and to rest my weary self. I took off my boots and laid my heels in the little bit of water for perhaps an hour. I judged it by the sun. I carried my boots with me and walked barefoot down the stream to cool my heels and to give my feet a rest from the boots. I came upon a hollow at one side of the draw, and in that indentation I saw naked feet, and the rest of whoever was in there was in the shade. I took a look, and it was Winton’s wife, or what was left of her. I knew she had been raped to death, as her legs were spread and her sex was bloody. Her nose and lips had been cut off and her mouth was stuffed with dirt. They had raped her and tortured her, and then killed her by stuffing her mouth and throat with dirt so she could not breathe. They had most likely held her feet while they stuffed her mouth, and I could tell from looking around, seeing horse tracks, the tracks of Indian feet, and the booted feet of Winton, that he, too, had found her. Felt he was close enough to her attackers he did not bother to bury her, feeling that he would come back to take care of the body later. I knew his thinking under the circumstances, and it was not good thinking. Those he had wanted to rescue were lost, and it would have been better to have shored up the body inside the hollow and to have collapsed the dirt on top of it. At least until he could go back and find a wagon and come for both the woman and the child. But his anger had overtaken him and made him as blind and savage as the Comanche.

  “I put on my boots and plodded ahead, knowing full well I should not. My fondness for Winton kept me going, even though I knew that he cheated in cards and that he had hornswoggled me out of several bounties in my time, and had lied to me on frequent occasions, and had even spoken badly to me when he was drunk. But he was a boon companion otherwise, and I could at least always depend on him to be himself. I followed the stream until it trickled out into a spread and finally into nothing. It was really more of a runoff from recent rain I had not experienced, which accounted for its slimness. I would have known that sooner had I been thinking. I had, however, fortified myself by drinking from the stream, had found a lizard and bit its head off and sucked out its guts and had managed not to puke it. So I was not as weak as I might have been, which, considering what I was to discover, was a good thing.