‘She may find it,’ I said.
‘She will not, and besides that, five dollars is too much. Leave her a dollar at the front desk. She could have her smock cleaned, with enough left over to drink herself into a stupor.’
‘You are only jealous because you don’t have a girl.’
‘Is that hard scrubber your girl? My congratulations. It’s a shame we couldn’t take her to Mother. She would be so glad to meet the delicate flower.’
‘If it’s a question of talking with a fool or not at all, I will choose the second.’
‘Spitting into the dirt, wiping her nose on her sleeve. A very special lady indeed.’
‘Not talking at all,’ I said, and I left him to gather his things. Stepping into the road to meet Tub, I greeted him and asked how he was feeling. He appeared more alert than the day previous, though his eye was so much the worse, and I found myself sympathetic to the animal. He was resilient, if nothing else. I moved to stroke him but when my hand landed on his face he started, and I experienced shame at this, that he was so unused to a gentle touch. I decided to try to show him a better time, and made a private promise to this effect. Now Charlie exited the hotel, chuckling at the tender scene. ‘Witness here the lover of all living things,’ he called. ‘Will he leave his faulty beast cash in its feedbag? I would not put it past him, friends.’ He approached and snapped his fingers on either side of Tub’s head. Tub’s ears twitched and Charlie, satisfied with the test, moved to attend to Nimble. ‘We will be out of doors for the rest of the trip,’ he said. ‘No more lazing about in hotel rooms for us.’
‘It makes no difference to me,’ I told him.
He paused. ‘I only mean, if you suffer another of your spells or illnesses, I will have to carry on without you.’
‘Spells or illnesses? That’s fine, coming from you. Two times now you’ve slowed our progress with your drinking.’
‘All right then, let’s just say that we’ve had some bad luck, and set a poor example for ourselves. What’s passed is passed, but that’s the last of it, are we agreed?’
‘Let’s not hear anymore of my spells or illnesses.’
‘Fair enough, brother.’ He mounted Nimble and looked down the road, beyond the storefronts and toward the wilderness. I heard the tapping of metal on glass and saw the hotel woman standing in mine and Charlie’s room on the second story, the five dollars gripped between her fingers as she rapped it across the pane. Now she kissed the coin and held her palm to the window, and I crossed my arms at Charlie, whose face was cold and thoughtless; he kicked Nimble in the ribs and rode away. I raised a hand to the woman and she mouthed some words that I could not decipher but assumed were an expression of thanks. I turned to follow Charlie, thinking of her voice in the empty room where she worked and worried, and I was glad to have left her the money and hoped it would make her happy, if only for a little while. I resolved to lose twenty-five pounds of fat and to write her a letter of love and praises, that I might improve her time on the earth with the devotion of another human being.
Chapter 20
There was a storm at our backs, the last true storm of the winter, but we managed to keep ahead of it and made good time through the afternoon and into the night. We set up camp in a large cave, its roof blackened with the soot of other men’s fires. Charlie made us a dinner of beans and pork and biscuits but I only ate the beans, secretly feeding the rest to Tub. I went to sleep hungry and woke up in the middle of the night to find a riderless horse standing at the mouth of the cave, breathing and rocking on its feet. It was black in coloring and slick with sweat; when he began to shiver, I approached him and tossed my blanket over his back.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Charlie, leaning up on his elbow beside the fire.
‘A horse.’
‘Where is the rider?’
‘There is no rider that I can see.’
‘If the rider appears, you may wake me.’ He turned and fell back asleep.
The horse was seventeen hands tall and all muscle. He had no brand or saddle or shoes but his mane was clean and he did not shy from my hand. I brought him a biscuit but he was not hungry and only nibbled at it. ‘Where are you headed to, running through the night like that?’ I asked him. I tried to guide him toward Nimble and Tub, to share in their huddled heat, but he pulled away and returned to the mouth, where I had found him. ‘You mean to leave me without a blanket, is that it?’ I reentered the cave to stoke the fire, curling up beside it for warmth, but I could not sleep without proper covering and instead spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious. By the time the sun rose in the morning I had decided to keep this horse for my own. I told my plan to Charlie as I handed him his coffee and he nodded. ‘You can have him shoed in Jacksonville. And we might get a fair price for Tub, though I doubt it—they’ll probably only slaughter him. Well, you can keep whatever money you get. You’ve had a tough time with Tub, I’ll not deny it. A happy coincidence, this horse just walking up to meet you. What will you call him? What about, Son of Tub.’
I said, ‘I should think some farmer would be happy to pay for Tub’s services. He has a few good years left yet.’
‘I wouldn’t get his hopes up.’ He turned to Tub and said, ‘Stew meat? Or pretty pasture, with the farmer’s soft-bottomed daughter?’ To me he whispered, ‘Stew meat.’
The black horse accepted the bit and saddle without incident. Tub hung his head when I slung a rope around his neck and I could not meet his eyes. We were two miles out when we found the dead Indian on the ground. ‘This will be the previous owner,’ Charlie said. We rolled him over to get a look. His body was stiff and distorted, his neck snapped back and his mouth open wide in an expression of absolute suffering.
‘Strange, though, that an Indian horse would take a bit and saddle,’ I said.
‘Must’ve been that he stole it from a white man,’ said Charlie.
‘But the horse has no shoes or brand?’
‘It’s a conundrum,’ he admitted. Pointing to the Indian, he said, ‘Ask him.’
The Indian had no wounds to explain his death but was extremely heavyset and we thought perhaps he had suffered an attack of organ failure, then fell from the horse and broke his neck. ‘Horse just kept on going,’ Charlie said. ‘Likely they were headed to the cave. I wonder what he’d have done, the two of us sleeping in his spot like that.’ The black horse lowered his head to the Indian, smelling and nudging him. At this same time I could feel Tub looking at me. I decided to return to our travels. At first the black horse didn’t want to leave but once we were clear he ran very nicely despite the rough terrain, and having Tub in tow behind us. A heavy rain began to fall but the chill was gone from the air; I was sweating, as was the new horse, and his smell and warmth were agreeable to me. His every move was sharp and graceful and I found him to be an altogether gifted runner, and though it did not feel good to think of it, I knew it would be a great relief to be free of Tub. I looked back at him and watched as he did his best to keep up. His eye was watering and bloodshot and he held his head up and to the side, as if to avoid drowning.