Boy hidy, said one of the men watching. I call next.
She tried to clamp her knees but he was in there. Then her hand happened upon the pistol he wore backward on his belt. She squeaked the gun from its holster and flipped it in the air like a circus shooter. In quick succession she shot the three men witnessing—gut, chest, neck—who hit the ground dead still holding their peckers before the fellow atop her realized she had the barrel under his chin.
Wait, he grunted, I’m fixing to get a nut—
But he didn’t.
She shoved him away dead, his member still engorged and purple like an obscene mushroom. She swapt it off with his own bootknife and watched the stump blurt a rope of blood and spume like that fountain they had down in Mobile where men went to meet other men.
Sitting in the dirt, she held her head for a while, then pulled on her pants. Insects were gathering at the edge of the pooling blood like souls needing baptism. She wrenched the boots from the veteran and stabbed her feet into them. She reloaded his revolver and shot him a few more times in the gape where his jaw had been and collected their guns and then, despite her disinclination, she found the horses where they were tied and freed three and for herself chose the tall bay with spotted legs and leapt into the saddle.
In the afternoon the field began to fill up with crows gorging on corn. After a while they came through the stalks and gorged on the eyes of the men, and then their tongues.
Meanwhile, time passes. The chase stretches. The men endure. Some forget who they’re chasing or why.
But Walton never forgets. They’ve commandeered a steamship now, chugging upriver, the horses irritable, the men bored.
A river is no place for a man, the Christian Deputy leader thinks, pacing up the deck and back. On the bank he sees a wildcat lift its dripping muzzle from a slain “razorback” hog. Walton flings his hand in the air. There! That is the life for a man. Any moment that a man is not wearing a bloody beard he is less than he can be. The leader gave a two-fingered salute. You are manly, noble wildcat! But not I, not with this, not with this, with this, this, this this this this bull-crap!
Lord forgive the profane word I just thought in my head. My flawed human brain! No excuse but my pent-up wrath at this sinner I’m chasing. I won’t even say her name. She “galls” me, Lord. This Evavangeline. She tempts me, my Savior. They all think she’s a man but I know the truth, O Lord Savior. Mine eyes are better than mine companions’ eyes are and I was first in the door, Lord Jesus, and I know that while they are just mites, they are womanly breasts indeed, Lord Jesus Christ, and what else she had, O God in Heaven, I won’t mention in Your Devine Presence, but You of course know Yourself, don’t You, as Your Noble Lucky Hands formed it Themselves, didn’t They, Lord? There it was, glistening, O Holy, just for the flick of a second, Lord Jesus Christ Above, and I saw it from behind! Her “cooter,” Lord! Her delicious red vulva! Lord my Christ my Healer! And thus I am forever tempted by this woman. Evavangeline. Evavangeline. Hers is the first vulva I have seen other than Mother’s, O Lamb of God O Perfect Prince. Please in the meantime forgive this hapless sinner, Lord. Amen.
Across the deck, on Walton’s command, Ambrose was teaching the troops to read. There’d been grousing about having a Negro tutor the men, but Walton had delivered a stirring lecture about the necessity of the races getting along. It was why, he confessed, he’d chosen a Negro as his number two man. When no one seemed moved by their leader’s oratory brilliance, however, he had threatened to dock the pay of any bigot. Meanwhile, Walton spotted the tip of a bow among the troops.
Red Man! he called, replacing his hat, securing the cinchcord underneath his chin.
A tall red-skinned man stepped up out of the crowd of students; the bow belonged to him.
You’re Cherokee or something, aren’t you? Walton said.
Something.
Don’t get “riled.” Why isn’t your hair longer? In a braid? There’s not really a C.D. rule about hair length. In fact, it might be fashionable if you were to let it grow—
Long hair is vanity.
Ah. Yes. We agree. I’ve been needing to “get my ears lowered” too. But listen. What’s your opinion of, if we’re tracking a certain convicted sodomite, and we’re on a steamboat, say, forging upriver, and our quarry is probably, you know, on land by now, going really fast, train or horseback, whatever, and we’re stuck here on this unholy lurching boat moving about a knot a day which is essentially not moving?
I’m not sure I understand, Mister Walton.
Captain Walton, please. Okay. I used to be a schoolmaster. He looked at his troop of eager readers. None of you all knew that, did you? Schoolmaster from Philadelphia. (Suddenly he ached for his chalkboard, but alas it was packed aback the mule.)
What I mean, he went on, is that I’m adroit at explaining things. Especially with a blackboard. But let’s try it this way, Red Man. Is it okay for us to get off this unholy raft and get the horses some exercise before they go crazy, and get the men some exercise before they go crazy? We’ll gallop to the next dock and find out if she got off or stayed on. I mean he.
I see. The tall Indian leaned his bow aside and adjusted his quiver of arrows. He frowned and pursed his lips and squinted his eyes and gritted his gleaming teeth, as if for him thought manifested itself as a severe headache.
Walton’s thoughts ran back to Evavangeline. To that day in Shreveport when she worked the door in the tavern across from the cheap hotel where he was living. (When they “bunked” in town on rare occasions, the other deputies usually shared a room, Ambrose out back in a barn or shed as most of these establishments harbored ill feelings for Negroes. But Walton always preserved his privacy for devotionals and prayer. It wasn’t classist, he insisted to his mother in his long, florid letters, but was instead the necessary separation of leader from led.) On the day in question, he was ambling out of the barber’s from having a shave and boot shine and saw her standing in the door under the saloon’s awning. One in the afternoon. She was dressed like a schoolgirl. Pigtails. Her cheeks smattered with fake freckles. She fetchingly held a sign that said “Fuck $1” and was illustrated by a crude drawing of a man and woman copulating “doggie-style”; Walton assumed the latter was for Shreveport’s copious illiterate. The leader of the Christian Deputies stood in the middle of the street watching the girl. Then she noticed him. He couldn’t look away. A clatter of horse and buggy blocked them and then they saw one another again, his clothes flecked with mud and horseshit, a lump in his pants. She fingered the lapel of her shirt and flashed him a quick-tiny breast, startling and white in the sun and then gone, but not before he’d seen the bloodred nipple as big as a thirty-eight caliber cartridge.
Mother! Lord Jesus!
He’d covered his eyes with both hands and whirled, weeping. She went back inside.
The next day he’d spent in his room. He prayed and slammed his fingers in the drawer of the desk on which he ought to have been writing dialogue for the play he’d been outlining in his logbook. He would try that. He dipped his quill in the inkwell and swirled it around. He brought it up dripping and blotted it. It was hard to write with his fingers throbbing. He made a mental note to slam his other hand next time. Painfully, he began to make a letter. Capital “B.” He followed it with a lowercase “r” and was well on his way to spelling “Breast” when he slammed down the pen. His fingernails were turning black, and he had a sudden restored memory of being dressed like a girl, his nails painted red. He covered his face with his hands and his eyes gazed out through the bars of his fingers.