The burn was intense and immediate. It made my brain hurt somewhere deep between my brows. The squinting was involuntary. My horse made a sound and pawed at the air with one hoof. “Steady, now,” I told him, taking the reins and turning away, unable to take it any longer. Blinking tears, I could see a green image in my vision, a disk the color of fresh grass. I wondered if this was what they claimed to see, those who danced and saw what weren’t there.
The wire fence drooped like it was melting in the sun. A faint wind blew dust across my boots. Back toward the fort, mountains rose from the flat desert, impossibly tall, the white on their tops growing with the cold months. I blinked and blinked and wondered what in the hell I was doing out there. How could anyone dance around for three days and stare at the sun? Determined, I gave it another try. I would go for the count of twenty, pain be damned. If an Arapaho could do it, so could I.
Throwing my head back, I squinted at the sun and met it like a man. Again, the feeling was like claws raking my eyeballs. There was a primitive urge to look away, like a thumb on a hot pan. I forced my eyes open wider, muscles in my face quivering in complaint, tears streaking down my cheeks. I lost count. I swayed, my balance funny, and reached for a fence post to steady myself. As my horse clomped down the road, I ignored him. There was nothing but white and heat, both penetrating straight into my brain. I hopped in place and cursed nothing in particular, just said “shit” and “damn” while the tears streamed out, but no bright light was stronger than this Virginia boy.
I had to’ve gone to a count of twenty, but I decided to keep going a bit more. I had the water in the canteen, could dump that in my eyes after and put the fire out. There was no thought of going blind. That fear would come later. I was just enduring the pain because, goddamnit, it wasn’t going to beat me.
My neck cramped up, but now something had taken hold of me, some wild thought that this was the right thing to do, to stare at the sun for as long as I was able. Releasing the post, I drifted around in circles there in the dirt, admiring the shapes and colors as they spun in my vision. I saw purple. I saw strangers swim through the sky. When my lids clamped down involuntarily, I used my fingers to pry them open again. The burn and pain went straight through me until it felt like an itch being scratched. I spun and spun and felt the barbed wire catch at my trousers. The fence would keep me in. I thought of Collins spinning around in his little Indian hut. The barbs were suddenly those sticks, poking at me, corralling me. The light shone right through my eyes, down to the base of my skull, and deep into my neck where words are formed. My face grew warm, but now the bright light was cool as it swam through me. I could hear myself laugh. The horse drew away farther, and I cared little.
When the vision came, it was a thunderclap. A sudden roar, though I realized the words had been there before. They were the buzzing in my brain, nonsense words, but I knew what they meant. I saw them like shapes and things, like swirling dreams. There was shouting, someone on the road with me, a man with my own voice. Crying and crying, fingers pinned my eyes open, and I never wanted to look away from the sun again. I loved it in that instant. I wanted it to fall out of the sky and enter me through my eyeballs; I wanted to let it blow me across the prairie and set everything on fire, to burn that land ahead of its coming, to make room. I saw men and women and children fall before me. I saw an infant thrown into the flames, blood in everyone’s eyes. And the voices, these words foreign and understood that came like pictures directly into my head, this voice on the road that spoke as I spun and spun between the barbed wire and my skittish horse, they sounded like the tongue of a Red Man.
I woke up and men were dead. My men. Something told me there had been a killing. My head throbbed like my heart was trapped in my skull, had swollen up, and needed out. It took a moment to realize my eyes were open but I wasn’t seeing anything. I could barely make out a shape in front of my face when I waved my hand before it. Groping about, I felt a bunk beneath me, a wall of steel bars behind. I was in the pen. I could feel the firing squad lined up, instruments of death aimed at my chest, could see the men I’d killed.
“Sir, he’s done stirred.”
Voices and shuffling feet. I had Arapaho on my tongue, the taste of silver and fire, words like pictures drawn in the dirt, telling me what to do. Something alien had communicated with me. A part of it lived deep inside.
“Drink some water, son.”
There was a hand on my wrist, a hand reaching through the bars. A tin of water was pressed into my palm, sloshing cool on my forearm. My lips stung as I drank. I pulled the cup away and touched my mouth, found my lips swollen and cracked. My throat burned. But the horrible throbbing in my eyes and my brain drowned out these lesser hurts.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“Major?” My voice was a pale shadow of its old self. I drank more, ignoring the sting of my fouled lips. “What did I do?” I asked.
“They found you face-up in the dirt, babbling like you had a few too many. Your horse came back to the fort without you.”
“I can’t see.”
“That’s what you’ve been sayin’. Doc said to put you in here where it was dark, that it should come back. You rest up, okay? Can’t afford to lose any more of my men.”
“How many?”
I could hear the boards creak as the major shifted his weight. “How many of what, son?”
“Did I… How many dead?” Memories and visions were mixed up in my head. Words I knew and words I didn’t. There were flashes of green and swimming lights in my eyes like an angry campfire. Something was telling me to kill or that I already had, hard to tell which.
“Get some rest. I’ll send some food over.”
I nursed my water and decided I hadn’t done the things I thought I had. But I could feel the urge. Some silent screaming beneath my skin, something directing my bones. I was reminded of a visit to Richmond when I was a boy. A friend of my mother’s was a pastor there, took us to his great big church. There was a belfry terribly high off the ground, a circuit of rickety stairs, and at one corner you could peer down at the street like a bird. And something in me felt this urge to jump out and go plummeting down, something so strong that I had to back away and clutch my father, even though I was too old to be holding his hand. And now this demon was in my blood again, but this time to hurt others.
Long after the tin cup was dry, I continued to pass it back and forth between my hands. It was Collins who brought me my supper.
“You gone and blinded yourself, ” Collins said, a voice in the darkness. Hinges pealed as he let himself into the pen, and I realized the door had never been locked. I hadn’t killed no man. Not that day, anyhow.
The plate was warm as he rested it on my knee. A fork was pressed into my palm. “You manage all right?” he asked. “See anything yet?”
I shook my head. I saw things, but not like he meant.
“I blame myself, ” Collins said. “But what was you thinking?”
“I weren’t,” I admitted. “Just started and couldn’t stop.”
Collins laughed. “Most take a glance and know it’s a bad idea.”
I groped around the plate with my fork, found some resistance, some weight. Took a sniff of potatoes and blew on ’em in case they was hot. How anyone lived with such blindness, I couldn’t fathom.