We looked about for any of our supplies that was left, but there wasn’t none. The Apaches on their decamping from their horse fort had come back and taken everything but the wagon with the cut wood in it and Prickly Pear’s clothes and gun. Cullen was convinced it was because he had backed up against that tree and put up a brave fight, and it was a sign of respect. But ain’t no one can be sure.
We didn’t even have a shovel to bury the men, and had no choice but to leave them where they fell for fear the hostiles might return. I think about that from time to time and wonder: should we have stacked them up and burned them? But in the end I guess there isn’t any right answer. I hope when they was found, as they was bound to be by others from the fort, there was enough left of them to give them a burial.
Me and Cullen walked back out to the wall of horses the Apache had made, cut off a piece of horse meat, peeled the hide from it, and with some matches we had and some of the wood we had cut earlier, started a fire and cooked it. The meat was a little rank, but we cooked it black and ate it anyway.
We drank some water from the creek, started walking in the general direction of our soldier fort with nothing but our weapons and our good intent. Went on like that for several hours, that sun beating down and us without even a canteen of water to refresh ourselves.
“I hate being a soldier,” Cullen said. “I don’t like getting shot at or chased by Indians. And now we got to go back and tell them how things didn’t go good. It’ll all be put on you, how it all went bad. And my feet hurt. And we always got to get up early in the morning. And I don’t want to cook.”
I was considering on what Cullen was saying when we came upon a pair of binoculars on the ground. I picked those up, and not long after we saw a couple of shiny buttons off cavalry uniforms lying on the ground. Following that we came upon the deer-hunting party, or what was left of them.
Their bodies and those of their horses was dotted over the landscape. The soldiers was stripped and had been scalped and cut up and such; missing eyes, ball sacks, toes, and assorted things deemed necessary for the living. The lieutenant we found partly burned up. A fire of mesquite bush and items from saddlebags had been put on his belly and set ablaze. It had burned right down into his stomach and made a hole, sizzling his innards. His body was still smoking, and there was that horrible smell of burning human flesh in the air, something I recalled from when Ruggert and his friends had burned up my pa. The saddles, bridles, the whole shebang had been taken off the horses. Apaches like leather.
“I guess it worked out best we didn’t go on the deer hunt,” I said.
“Appears that way,” Cullen said.
We looked around cautious-like, but it appeared we was on our own; no Apaches and no survivors. We went around and counted the dead and figured there was the right number there, though most of the troopers you couldn’t tell from a slaughtered steer. Only the lieutenant and one or two others was recognizable, one of them being Tornado. They had chopped his head off, but I knew it was him from the way he was built. They hadn’t taken his shirt and pants and boots, just his belt, and they had cut the buttons off his outfit. That’s all they took from him. And his head, of course.
The flies was something awful, and like the others we didn’t have no easy way to bury them. So there we stood, out in the hot sun amid those stinking bodies, and Cullen said, “Do you see a black horse? Or am I imagining it?”
“I see him,” I said.
“Do you see some dancing soldiers?”
“Nope.”
“Do you still see the horse?”
“I do,” I said.
“Is it Satan?”
“Yes. In more ways than one.”
“Good. Then I’m not imagining it.”
“He looks strong and rested,” I said. “Figure he found a water hole and some grass somewhere and maybe even a piece of horse ass. He has been taking it easy while we’ve been dealing with hellfire and damnation, the bastard.”
“Don’t talk mean,” Cullen said. “He might hear you. Look happy to see him.”
We started smiling, and I tried to whistle, but my mouth was dry as dirt.
Satan lifted his head and put a steely eye on us. I put my rifle and the binoculars down and started walking toward him, holding out my hand like I had a treat. I don’t think he fell for that, but he dropped his head and let me walk up to him. He still had on the bridle, and the reins was hanging down, so I reached out slow and careful and took hold of them.
I swung onto his back with more than a little effort, and as I was about to settle into the stirrups good, he bucked. I went whirling through the air and hit the ground so hard my breath flew out of my mouth like bees from a hive. When my head quit swimming and I could take a breath, Satan was poking me with his nose, making a noise that came as close to a laugh as was possible; a horse laugh, I might add.
Wobbling to my feet, I got hold of his reins and led him over to Cullen, limping slightly.
“He loves a good joke,” Cullen said. “But deep down, I think he likes you.”
“It’s pretty damn deep,” I said.
We gathered our rifles and the binoculars, climbed on Satan’s back, me at the reins, and started out in the direction of the fort, judging its location by the position of the sun. As we rode along, Cullen said, “You know, I right respect the buffalo soldiers, I surely do, and my short time there has been interesting, if not that rewarding. They are a fine bunch of individuals. Them that are still alive.”
I studied on that comment, said, “You saying something between the lines, Cullen?”
“I’m saying everyone is dead, and why not us?”
“I thought we was doing all we could not to be dead,” I said.
“And I’m suggesting we might keep that going for quite a while longer.”
I love these here United States, primarily cause I don’t know nothing else. That said, it turns out, even for thirteen dollars a month, I wasn’t all that in love with the cavalry. I didn’t like taking orders, for one, and I especially didn’t like being nearly killed by Indians. And then there was eating Cullen’s cooking.
“So if they’re all dead,” I said, “it stands to reason that we might be dead, too, just not found.”
“What I was thinking,” Cullen said.
We rode on a piece more, and then without thinking too hard on it, I started turning Satan away from the direction of the fort.
Satan had my canteen strapped on his saddle, and it was near full, and there was a couple bites of jerky in the saddlebags, so we ate that, and along with the fact we was riding, not walking, things was better than they had been shortly before. You could add to that our change of career plans, which was starting to appeal to me.
We had gone for most of a day when we seen something in the distance we couldn’t make out. I lifted the binoculars and seen there was a red-shirted colored fellow lying out there with his leg under a dead horse. A big sombrero lay on the ground nearby.
I assumed he was dead like the horse, or right near it, cause buzzards were circling overhead. One of them had lit down near the horse and was staring in its direction as if waiting for a signal. A little black cloud of flies was buzzing about.
Riding over there, we discovered the colored fellow wasn’t dead at all. Even with his leg trapped, he lifted up slightly on an elbow and pointed the business end of an old Sharps .50 at us.
“Hold up,” I said. “I ain’t got nothing against you.”
“You’re money on the hoof is all,” he said, then sighed and gently laid the Sharps on the ground. “It ain’t like I’m going to spend it, though.”
We dropped off Satan, and I gave Cullen the reins to lead him. I pushed the Sharps aside with my foot. The man didn’t try and stop me. I don’t think he had the strength to lift that heavy old rifle again. He didn’t have a handgun strapped to him.
I squatted by him. He had a face that looked as if it had been chopped out of dried wood. His eyes was so black they looked
like blackberries. I said, “Just resting?”
He took a deep breath. “Me and my horse thought we’d stop in the middle of the prairie, under the sun, and take a nap. It seemed like a nice enough day for it. Feeling pleasant, I asked him if he would lay down on my leg.”
“You had on that hat, you might could block out some of the sun.”
“I can’t get my leg out from under this dead bastard,” he said, kicking the horse with his free leg. “Not even enough to reach my hat. I like that hat. I had to kill a Mexican for it.”
Cullen picked up the hat and brought it to him, leading Satan as he came. The man was too weak to lift his hand and take it. I lifted his head, Cullen pushed the hat on him, and I settled his noggin back down on the ground. The back of the hat bent under him, the brim in front tilted so that it covered his face in shadow. I could see now that the horse had a couple of bullet holes in it. Sombrero Man had a hole himself, in his left side, between chest and belt. He was leaking out pretty fast.
“This ain’t how I was expecting things to work out,” he said.
“I reckon not,” I said. “Having a horse fall on you and getting shot up don’t seem like a good plan for nobody.”
“Can’t say as I can recommend it.”
“You’re the one hunting me, aren’t you?”
“I recognize your ears. I was told you had a set.”
“Why would you help those men? They despise colored folks.”
“They hired me because I’m a tracker, part Seminole, out of Florida originally, late of Nacogdoches, Texas. That Ruggert fellow heard about me and my tracking, come and hired me. Money was good.”
“Money’s no kind of reason,” I said.
“Thought I might grow up to do the ballet, but my legs looked bad in tights. So I do what I do. Only profession I got, tracking and killing people. Pays good, and I have a lot of time off.”
“Time to relax and get hold of yourself is always good,” Cullen said. “I didn’t have much of that and always wanted more. I liked my work, and was good at it, but more time off would have been good.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s a holdup on being a slave. Not enough time off.”
“That’s a good point you got there,” Cullen said. “Very true.”
“What I’d like to request is two things,” Sombrero Man said. “Could you get this horse off my leg, for one?”
“I’ll consider it,” I said. “Tell me—has Ruggert given up by now?”
“He took it right bad you raped his wife.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“Other one told me you just looked at her ass. I can understand that. I’ve had a piece of ever’ color ass I could find that would give out, and the thing is, an ass is an ass when you add it all up. But Ruggert, he didn’t see it that way. He is an odd piece of work, and he ain’t a forgetter.”
“So I’ve figured,” I said.
“We just stayed at it, and he kept paying me with money he got somewhere or another, so I stayed on. We come upon you first out by that abandoned buffalo wagon.”
“I remember.”
“Not much else to tell. We come to the conclusion you was in the army. Thought you’d leave the fort at some point, and we could cut you from the herd.”
“That has been one long wait.”
“I’ll say. But he paid, and I stuck. We camped nearby on the sly. Used a spyglass to see where you were. Followed your troop out when you took to the woodlot, lagged behind on purpose. I don’t know what he planned there, how he wanted to get you away from the others, but as I said, he was a determined cuss. I think he was considering on that when the Apache come upon us. I rode off when I saw it was hopeless. A couple of them redskins followed me on horseback. You walk out that way a piece, you’ll see the blood from one of them. He was the one shot me and killed my horse, brought it down on my leg. I got him, though. Made that shot with this fine horse lying on my leg, me stretched out here in God’s wide open. The one didn’t have a hole in him threw his pal across the dead man’s horse, mounted his own, and led the other after him. I wanted to shoot him, too, but the Sharps got heavy. I don’t know what happened to Ruggert and the other fellow, Hubert, who I figured for a drunk. Didn’t see him take a drink, but he rubbed his lips a lot and looked lonesome plenty. Usually got grumpy at suppertime. I’ll tell you, though, he only called me nigger once. We had an understanding after that.”
“Hubert is dead,” I said. “Apache got him.”
“Can’t say I miss him.”
“You never said the second thing,” Cullen said.
I had forgotten there was a second thing.
“No, I didn’t,” Sombrero Man said. “Number two’s this. Stay with me till I pass on. Take me some place where there’s a real graveyard. I don’t want to lay out here on the prairie. I want to be in God’s soil, have some words said over me.”
“I don’t owe you a thing,” I said.
“I ain’t got no hard feelings. Why should you?”
“Because you were going to kill me,” I said.
“I understand your point of view,” he said. “It’s a clear one.”
I studied on the problem a moment. “I should leave you for the buzzards, but I’ll do it. Ain’t getting you no headstone, though.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “No one would know who I was anyhow. For the record, my name is Cramp, or that’s what I’m called. Man got my Seminole mama’s belly full of me called me that. He run off early. I got a second name, but nobody used it much when I was little, and finally they didn’t use it at all, and now I don’t remember what it was. There ain’t a single person I know of alive that’s kin to me. But I was thinking God might forgive me some things if I was buried proper in his own ground.”
“It’s dirt,” I said. “And that’s all it is.”
“I think I’ve spoken enough for this life,” he said and started to breathe like a dog panting.
We dug around his leg with our hands. It was hard ground. Finally I got my knife out and broke the ground up good enough to slide his leg out from under the horse. The leg was a mess, bones sticking right through his pants, and he had bled out something awful. We dragged him around so he could rest his back against his horse. He closed his eyes, and after a bit he breathed less heavy, and finally he wasn’t breathing at all.
11
We figured as payment for taking him to a graveyard, anything in his saddlebags was ours, which was good, because the meager bits of grub we had was ate up. There was dried jerky in his bags and some pickled eggs in a leather pouch. The eggs was out of the shell, and they had broken up. They not only tasted pickled, they tasted like sweaty leather. We ate them anyway.
There was some oats in a bag on the horse, and we gave that to Satan, and from the dead man’s canteen we poured water in the sombrero and let Satan drink from that. When he finished drinking the water he ate part of the sombrero.
We also found a change of clothes in his possibles, and since the shirt fit me better than Cullen, I threw away my stinking army shirt and put it on, keeping my army coat and pants with the stripe. The extra pants didn’t fit neither of us, so we tossed them.
There was also a book of poetry in one of the saddlebags. It was handwritten, and I figured between tracking and killing, Cramp had liked to rhyme a little. I ain’t no great judge of poems, though Mr. Loving had me read a considerable number of them, but I can tell you these were so bad they hurt my feelings. I threw the book away and had an urge to bury it lest a coyote come across it, read a few lines, and get sick.
“There’s a town I come through on the way here to joining up with the soldiers. Ransack,” I said.
“I come to it myself,” Cullen said.
“We might go there. They’re bound to have a graveyard.”
“We could just leave him here and wouldn’t nobody ever know,” Cullen said.
“I’d know.”
“I think I could know and get over it,” he said
.
“Maybe I could in time,” I said, “but a promise is a promise.”
“How we going to do it? We just got the one horse.”
Cramp had a lariat and a bedroll. I stretched the bedroll on the ground, then me and Cullen laid Cramp on it and wrapped him in it along with what was left of his sombrero, which we laid on his chest. I wound the lariat around his body and tied it so we could drag him behind us. We got his Sharps then, climbed on Satan, and started out.
That bedroll idea wasn’t perfect, but it’s what we had. Fact was, once we got loaded up and headed out, the bedroll began to come apart on the boot end, and after a few miles one of Cramp’s boots slipped free of the blanket and thumped along the ground.
In time we come across enough small trees to cut a couple of limbs with my knife and make a travois—and this took some work, I assure you. The travois lifted the body off the ground more and kept what was left of the blanket from wearing. Parts of Cramp, including his face, was starting to peek out of it. He was also growing a mite ripe, and his face, which first swelled up, was now withering like an old potato.
We come to Ransack near nightfall.
Seeing it from a distance, Ransack looked like a series of large fireflies in the midst of shadow shapes, but it was kerosene lamps and fires, and the shapes was buildings.
As we rode in it was as silent as death, us having a very recent companion who belonged to that club, and then suddenly there was sound. At first it was like the hum of a fly, then we could hear clattering and a bit of music coming from one of the bars—a tuba, a piano, a banjo, and some kind of horn that might have been a trumpet or some idiot blowing through a pipe.
We went wide of that, as I was thinking if there was any colored folks around they’d be at the back of the town and wouldn’t be welcome around white folks’ saloons, stores, or women. When we come to the backstreets, it wasn’t my people I seen but China folk. I had seen pictures of them in books Mr. Loving had, but here they was now, in the flesh.
There was four or five Chinamen and a China girl next to a big fire with a metal rack over it and a large, black pot of boiling laundry on it, the likes of which the China girl was stirring with a long, thin board. The firelight was so bright you could see the colors of the shirts in the churning laundry. The men was all about the same size and wore loose clothes. The girl was dressed the same and was almost as thin as the board she was holding. Her hair was long and black and bound behind her head, and the men had a single pigtail hanging off their partly shaved heads. Along with the pigtails they wore curious expressions, like maybe we was the first colored they’d seen, though it may have been on account of we was dragging a body you could smell from about three acres away and Cramp’s boot was hanging out of the blanket along with an arm that had come loose and was dragging in the dirt.