"It's hard livin up there, Mrs. Pierce."
"Well it aint no bed a goddam roses down here neither, is it?"
The men hung on in the main room a bit more for courtesy, swapping small talk and trying to remember which of the wild Pierce boys had been responsible for which piece of mischief, trying to keep out of the way of the women, who seemed to know what they were there for. Mrs. Pierce weaved her way through the somber crowd assuring and being assured that her poor Joey was a good boy and would be sorely missed by all. Brian noticed she was wearing the boy's Silver Star on a chain around her neck.
It took a good hour to get through the crowd, the people didn't seem to see much of each other and there was a lot of catching up to do, but they were herded steadily, inevitably, toward the bedroom where they knew Honda Joe would be laid out. They shied and shuffled at the doorway a little, but there was no avoiding it. A steady, humming moan came from within, surrounded by other, soothing sounds. J.C. took a deep breath and led the way.
Whoever did the postmortem on Honda Joe must have learned the trade by mail. The corpse, tucked to the chin under an American flag, looked more like it should have been leaning against a stuffed pony at the Wall Drug Store than like something that had lived and breathed. The skin had a thick look to it and a sheen like new leather, and even under the flag you could tell everything hadn't been put back where it belonged. The men went past the Murphy bed on both sides, up on their toes as if someone was sleeping. They clasped their hands in front of them and tried to look properly mournful. Jackson Blackroot muttered a few words to the corpse. Brian took his turn and concentrated on a spot on the boy's hairline till he felt he'd put in his time. He was moving away when he heard the whooping from outside.
"Yee-haaaaa!" somebody was yelling. "Yipyip-yeeeeee I "
There was the sound of hooves then, and the whooping grew distant. The men emptied out into the night range to see what it was.
"Yeow! Yeow! Yeow!" called a voice over to the left. Someone was riding a horse out there in the pitch black, someone pretty loaded from the sound of him.
"Goddam Indians," grumbled one of the old men wearing a VFW hat. "Got no sense a dignity."
"Yee-hahaaaaa!" called the rider as a gray shape galloped by on the right.
"Sounds a bit like Bad Heart," said J.C. "Sounds a whole lot like him."
They went to J.C.'s pickup and Bad Heart was gone. There was some gear missing too, some rope, a bridle. They checked in the front. J.C.'s shotgun was still there but Jackson's Bowie knife was gone.
"He loses it I'll wring his goddam neck," said Jackson.
The men all got in their cars and pickups then and put their headlights on. The beams crisscrossed out across the little basin, making eerie pockets of dark and light.
"Yah-haaaaa!"
A horse and rider appeared at the far. edge of the light, disappeared into shadow, then came into view again. It was Bad Heart, bareback on the little scab-colored stallion. It strained forward as if it were trying to race right out from under him. There was something tied with rope to its tail, dragging and flopping behind, kicking up dust that hung in the headlights' arc. Bad Heart whacked its ribs and kneed it straight for the dry streambed. It gathered and leaped, stretching out in the air, and landed in perfect stride on the far bank.
"Fucker can ride," said Jim Crow.
"Fucker could always ride," said J.C. "Nobody ever denied that. Like he's born on horseback."
Bad Heart lay close to the line of the stallion's back, seemed to flow with its every muscle. With the day's blood staining his old tan Levi's and the scabby red-brown of the horse it was hard to tell where one began and the other left off.
"Yee-yeeheeeeeeeel"
Bad Heart circled the trailer a few more times before a couple of the young men commandeered jeeps and lit out after him. It was a good chase for a while, the jeeps having more speed but the little stallion being able to cut and turn quicker. They honked and flicked their lights and kept Bad Heart pinned in view of the trailer but couldn't land him till he tried to make the horse jump the streambed one time too many. It just pulled up short and ducked its head, sending him flying over, tumbling through the air till he hit halfway up the opposite bank.
The horse trotted off out of all the lights and Bad Heart lay wailing.
He was pretty scraped up when they got to him, one side of his face all skinned and his left leg bent crooked from midway up the thigh. He cursed as they made a splint from a rake handle, cursed as they carried him in on a blanket, cursed when they laid him out on the Murphy bed next to Honda Joe.
"Wait'll the fucker wakes up in the mornin," he kept saying while they tried to calm him down. "Gonna have a big surprise. Wait'll he wakes up. Big fuckin surprise."
Jackson found his Bowie knife tucked in Bad Heart's boot when they pulled it off. The knife was bloody up to the hilt.
Brian went out with J.C. and Jackson to see about the horse. Everyone had turned their headlights off so J.C. got his flashlight from the pickup. They walked out in the dark a bit and then they heard whuffing up ahead and J.C. shined at it.
The stallion held its head up high, eyes shining back amber in the beam, bridle dangling, chest and sides lathered and heaving. It stood and looked at them as Jackson whispered his way up and took the bridle.
J.C. came up and took the Bowie knife from Jackson. He cut the rope free from the stallion's tail. Brian went back with him to see what had been dragging behind.
It was a blood-sticky hide. The hair coarse and greasy, like something you'd scuff your feet clean on. It had a sad, lonely smell. It smelled like The West.
J.C. played the light off away from it. "I suppose we best take this thing over, break the news to old Sprague. You wanna come along for the ride?"
"Sure."
"Spose we'll call it a night after that. Get you up to go in the morning." He turned the flashlight on the stallion limping a bit as it followed Jackson toward the trailer. "There isn't all that much to do in Interior anyways."
Golden State
HE MEXICANS TOOK Brian across the desert and over the mountains to the Coast in the black night. They sat in the front seat and spoke to each other in their language for the entire ride. Brian was relieved not to feel obligated to talk or to listen. Only the violent shaking of the old Comet kept him awake.
The Mexicans turned south when they hit ioi and Brian got out. The road was halfway down the western slope of a string of mountains. Trees blocked the view but he could hear the ocean in the distance. The Pacific. It was the warmest night he'd had on the trip; it would be easier to sleep out now and find his way to the water when it got light.
Brian started down through the woods, looking for a flat spot to lie, and stopped when he saw the word. It was barely visible over the treetops, glaring in blue neon. HAMBU. Brian spread his bag out and lay down. He had hitched a hard three thousand miles and in the morning he would be there. The hours of Spanish in the dark car, the steady ocean sound, the strange word in the sky — all made him feel like he was in a foreign country, an island in the South Seas maybe, or the coast of Africa.
"You can gain more knowledge in one crossing of the map," Brian's father used to say, eyes swimming in an earlyevening buzz, "than in four years at one of your so-called institutes of higher learning. Travel, travel is the greatest educator." The old man had missed the war, had made it over to Scranton once for a railworkers' convention and down to Atlantic City a few summers with the family. He did the rest of his traveling in front of the TV at the bar in the Hibernian. "When I was young I should have listened to my itchy feet," he'd say, "instead of another certain part of my anatomy. I chased the girls till your mother put salt on my tail, and then I wasn't a young man anymore."