“He ain’t exactly loyal about the people that live in his village, is he?” Son said.
“His balls are hanging over a fire right now, boy.”
The Mexican officer motioned them toward him with a casual gesture of his fingers, as though he were dealing with a situation that was momentarily irritating and would soon be corrected. When they didn’t move, his eyes became more concentrated, and fixed on them under the black bill of his cap.
“Aqui,” he said.
“How do you like a fellow like that telling you to fetch for him?” Son said.
“What language do you speak?” the Mexican said. “English? French? Come here.”
Hugh wiped the raccoon blood off his knife blade and stuck it down in his trousers with the edge turned upward.
“Let him walk over here,” Son said.
“He’s got the guns and the men. We ain’t got nothing but this pig sticker between us. Try to use your head awhile.”
They walked across the clearing, and Son looked with more curiosity than heat into the officer’s face. It didn’t have the toughness of a soldier’s, not the ones whom he had occasionally seen back in Tennessee or the mountain men who had fought with Andrew Jackson at Chalmette outside of New Orleans. Instead, the lines and the skin were soft, without windburn or scars or even a faint discoloration from the flint exploding into the flashpan of a rifle. The eyes went back to Europe, to an autocratic view of the world that he resented without even being able to understand it completely.
“Where did you get them?” the officer said.
“We got out of the army a couple of months ago and decided to try our luck over in Texas,” Hugh said.
“How did you get the horses?”
“When him and me got discharged in Opelousas, we seen our mounts getting auctioned off to some Frenchies, and we bought them for five dollars apiece. Then we swapped them to Iron Jacket for a stay here and that squaw over by the tepee.”
“The Americans don’t sell their horses unless they burn the brand first.”
“Yes, sir, that’s true. But the first sergeant that was doing this sale is drunk most of the time, and he don’t go about particulars when you show him a gold piece. Also, I was hurrying a little bit to get across the Sabine. I used to visit this lady that lives in St. Martinville—”
“What did you do with the saddles? Did you bury them along the road with the men you killed?”
“I don’t think you’re listening, Lieutenant. We didn’t steal no horses, and we sure didn’t kill nobody,” Hugh said.
“How did you get those scars on your ankles?”
“I done some time when I was a kid.”
“What do you care where them horses come from?” Son said. “You’re taking them from the Indians, ain’t you?”
“Son,” Hugh said.
“Them horses is ours. We rode them over from Louisiana, and what we done over there ain’t any business of yours.”
“I think both of you are escaped convicts,” the officer said.
The wind blew out of the pines and scattered ashes from the fire burning under the racks of venison in the center of the village. Son felt the wound in his side begin to quiver again.
“I done told you, Lieutenant,” Hugh said. “I got these manacle scars when I was a boy over in Mississippi. All we want is to get up to the plains and make some money knocking down buffalo.”
The lieutenant looked Son hard in the eyes.
“Do you know a Frenchman, a prison warden, named Landry?” he said.
Son stared back at him and forced his eyes not to blink.
“There’s a lot of Frenchies by that name. I don’t know no prison guard.”
“I didn’t say ‘guard.’”
“I ain’t ever seen you before, and you’re telling me I been in prison.”
“This man’s brother was murdered by these two convicts. He believes one of them may have been shot. You limp when you walk, don’t you?”
“I been limping since my horse hit a whistle-pig hole and throwed me over his head. Look at his hoof. It’s splayed. He ain’t going to be worth nothing to you.”
“Take off your pants.”
“What?”
“Take them off.”
“You must be drinking the same stuff that drives these Indians crazy.”
The lieutenant motioned to his sergeant major, who rode his horse forward out of the formation and kicked Son squarely in the middle of the face with his boot heel. He felt the Spanish roweled spur bite into his forehead, and he fell sprawling in the red dust, his nose ringing with pain. Two other enlisted men dismounted, pulled his boots from his feet, then began jerking his trousers off his legs. He kicked at them while they dragged him on his back, but he kept one arm pinned across the shirt that covered the wound in his side.
“Get up,” the lieutenant said.
He rose to his feet and felt the wind blowing across his buttocks and genitals. The fat women by the venison racks were laughing in their hands, and he saw the eyes of the soldiers looking at his sex. The backs of his legs were shaking, and his hands were like wood by his sides.
“Turn around,’ the lieutenant said.
“You greaser sonofabitch. Them Texians are going to cut your liver out one day, and I hope I’m there for it.”
He saw the insult, the word, tick in the officer’s eyes.
“You ought not to done that, Lieutenant,” Hugh said. “You can see he ain’t never been shot.”
“Yes, but he’s been whipped.”
“Upbringing in the Cumberland Mountains ain’t easy sometimes,” Hugh said.
“I want both of you to leave this village. Don’t ever come again,” the lieutenant said. Then he turned toward Son and looked at him with a face as cool and smooth as marble. “Don’t ever use words like that to a Mexican officer again. Today you are a fortunate young man.”
The sergeant major brought up his horse, a Morgan with wideset eyes, and the lieutenant swung up into the split-wood saddle as though his body had no weight. Son watched him post ahead of the formation and the two long strings of Indian horses that followed him toward the pine trees.
He picked up his pants and put them on awkwardly. He felt as though he were moving inside a dream. For the first time, he looked back at the tepee and saw that White-Man’s-Woman had gone inside and tied the flap to the lodge pole.
“I seen actors on stage in a public house that never done that good,” Hugh said.
“I wasn’t doing no acting.”
“Hell, you wasn’t. I thought any minute your side was going to pop loose and spill jelly all over that lieutenant’s boot.”
“I’m going to get a dirk in that fellow, Hugh.”
“No, you ain’t.”
“He earned a new asshole today.”
“The only thing you and me are going to do is get our butts out of here. I wish that Mexican had said how long ago he seen Emile Landry. Maybe he figured we headed toward Bexar or the coast, but the chances are he knows we didn’t get too far with you carrying a ball. I’d feel a lot better if we got a big piece of Texas between us and him.”
“He probably went on through. There must be money on us now, and that Mexican would have taken us with him if he thought he could turn a dollar on our hides.”
“Emile Landry is just smart enough to let us think like that, too. He might be a cruel sonofabitch, but he can sniff a blood spore in the ground like a dog. Before they sent you up to the camp, a crazy fellow got loose from the chain once and ran back through the marsh. All the other guards figured he’d just die in there because he was so crazy he couldn’t poke a hand in his mouth to feed himself sometimes. But Landry went after him and brought him back on a rope behind his horse.”
“That don’t change nothing. I still want a piece of that Mexican.”
“I don’t like to tell you things all the time, but what you let get done to yourself out here saved us from going back to the pen. If it had been me when I was your age, I would have cut that fellow from his belly button right up to his throat. And that’s how I spent all the years I did in Frenchy jails. It ain’t good to look back sometimes and figure how many years you lost because you didn’t know how to stick a hot iron in water.”