“You started all this shit, Hugh.”
“She can go back to jerking venison around that hot fire or lying with Mexicans. She ain’t sleeping in here.”
“You got your brains shook loose, or you’re being a genuine sonofabitch.”
“Tell her to get or you can go with her.”
The woman walked outside into the moonlit center of the village and sat by the dead fire where the Choctaws had been smoking jerky that afternoon. Son stared through the flap at her immobile back and rigid head. He picked up a blanket and a buffalo robe and got to his feet.
“What are you doing?” Hugh said.
“Nothing.”
He walked to where the woman sat and put the robe and blanket beside her. She glanced up at him, almost apprehensively, then fixed her eyes on the far side of the clearing. The skin on her face was tight from the cold.
“He ain’t a bad man. He’s just dumb sometimes,” Son said.
She made no reply or even showed recognition that he was speaking to her.
“Look. Put them on. It’s going to get a lot colder before the sun comes up.”
The wind blew a long white crease in her hair.
“Suit yourself, but let me tell you something. Tomorrow he’s going to feel bad about what he done, and he’ll ask you to come back in and he won’t bother you no more.”
“He’s like the Mexicans that killed Buffalo Hump. They take the women and use the men on the soldiers’ town.” She spoke across the dead ashes of the fire pit without looking up.
“He ain’t like no Mexican. Who’s this Buffalo Hump?”
“They took him away to work on the soldiers’ town. When he ran away from them, they came back and killed him. Out there. In the trees.”
“Hugh ain’t like that. He hates them kind of people worse than you all do.”
“They said Buffalo Hump stole one of the metal bottles with the magic water.”
“I reckon there’s something wrong with the words I use, because you ain’t listening.”
He left her there and went back inside the tepee and tied the flap on the lodge pole behind him. His bare chest and shoulders were tingling when he wrapped himself in a blanket next to the warm stones by the fire pit.
Hugh squinted at him with his bad eye.
“Did you learn anything out there?” he said.
“Yes, I did. Crazy people come in all colors. Or maybe some of them is just dumb and old. You study on that one.”
“What?”
The next morning, when the sun rose yellow and cold through the pine trees and cast the first shadows through the red clay clearing, she still sat immobile by the edge of the fire pit, the buffalo robe draped in a hump over her head. Son’s side was stiff when he awoke, and he lay in his blankets while Hugh coughed and hawked in his throat and tried to blow the dead fire into embers with his breath.
“Where in the hell are my britches?” Hugh said.
“The last time I seen them you couldn’t throw them away fast enough.”
Hugh hawked again and spit a wad of phlegm out the tepee flap.
“Where’s that woman at? She should have had a breakfast fire going before we woke up.”
“I think she’s about there,” Son said, and pointed his finger over his head without looking.
“Tell her to get her ass in here and go to work.”
“I reckon I’ll lay here awhile. My side’s giving me a fit this morning.”
“You think you’re smart, don’t you?”
“No, I just ain’t learned to deal with these savages yet.”
“There’s a lot you ain’t learned to deal with. That’s for damn sure.”
Hugh buttoned his trousers over his flat, knife-scarred stomach and pushed the tangle of gray-black hair out of his eyes.
“It ain’t hard,” Son said. “Just tell her you won’t lose your britches again at night.”
He watched Hugh walk barefoot across the clearing toward the woman, his brown triangular back knotted with effort as though he were walking on sharp stones. Son drank the last of the cold venison stew from the bowl the woman had set on a flat rock next to the fire the night before, and touched the hardening pucker of tissue around Hugh’s knife marks in his rib cage. The blood had coagulated into the beginnings of a thick scab; he hadn’t bled during the night, and the red swelling across the rib where the ball had struck him was now only a soft pink. When Hugh came back into the tepee with White-Man’s-Woman and a bowl smoking with skinned catfish, he knew that everything was going to be all right for a while and Emile Landry and the law were lost somewhere behind them in the piney woods of east Texas.
Five days later, on a hard blue-gold afternoon, a contingent of Mexican cavalry rode their horses into the village.
Chapter three
“Look at them arrogant characters,” Hugh said. He and Son and White-Man’s-Woman were outside the tepee, cleaning two raccoons that Hugh had knocked out of a tree with a club. “If that ain’t a bunch of peacocks for you. They got enough braid and whistles on them to sink a horse through the ground.”
They watched the formation of horses and uniformed Mexicans approach Iron Jacket’s tepee, their silver scabbards and white bandoleers flashing in the sunlight. Iron Jacket stepped outside in his coat of mail with one coup feather in his hair. He looked absurd in front of the Mexican lieutenant.
“I think he’s about to make a yellow puddle around his moccasins,” Hugh said.
“They come for the horses at the last of the moon,” the woman said.
“You mean they make that old horse thief steal for them?” Hugh said.
“He only steals from the Americans, and they take away half.”
“That lieutenant must have his own business going then, because the Mexicans usually don’t bother the Indians,” Hugh said.
“You ever have trouble with them?” Son said.
“I had a bunch of them chase me across the Guadalupe once. But they ain’t too bright in dealing with a white man. They tried to swim their horses after me, and they almost drowned with all that junk they wear on themselves.”
“There go his horses. And I reckon ours, too,” Son said.
They watched five enlisted men walk back into the pines and drop the shaved poles that formed one side of the horse pen. In fifteen minutes they had formed all the horses into two long strings, and they cantered them in a broken line back to the center of the clearing. Iron Jacket was talking rapidly to the lieutenant, his coup feather glued flat to the side of his face.
“I thought they only took half,” Son said.
“At the last moon Iron Jacket had only nine horses,” the woman said. “The Mexicans were mad, and they took away Buffalo Hump and his sons.”
“I think that lieutenant just seen our brands,” Hugh said.
The lieutenant walked to the two army horses and ran his hand over the thick, hairless scar in the flank of Son’s roan.
“Why’s he so interested in where they come from?” Son said.
“He don’t want no trouble with any of Andy Jackson’s soldier boys. He knows there’s a whole army of them on the other side of the Sabine just waiting to come in and eat Texas up.”
“I got another feeling, Hugh. He’s heared something about us.”
“Them Mexicans don’t know nothing except what time to squat over the honey hole.”
The lieutenant walked back to Iron Jacket and spoke briefly, then the Indian pointed in the direction of their tepee.