“I thought you said they was Choctaws, that they wasn’t savages.”
“You can’t always tell if your selections are correct.”
“The next time I break out of jail, I ain’t going with a crazy man.”
“Be quiet, and don’t show them you’re scared. An Indian can’t tolerate two things, and that’s fear and lying.”
“Look at that one in the armor. Where did he get that at?”
They watched a tall Indian in a coat of Spanish mail and a pair of buckskin breeches walk toward them from a tepee that was covered with blue and yellow designs. The mail he wore overlapped like bird’s feathers, and the area around his bare arms was eaten with rust.
“You better think of something good to say. He don’t look like he wants us here,” Son said.
“He wants something, all right. He seen them Uncle Sam brands, and he wants to add them to his collection.”
The Indian looked up at them with his opaque face and hazel eyes, then put his thumb into the mouth of Son’s horse and pushed back its lips over the teeth. There was a hard line of callous across his chest where the top of his armor rubbed against the skin.
“We want to trade,” Hugh said.
“Where got?” the Indian said.
“We bought them off the army in Louisiana,” Hugh said.
“Soldiers no sell horses. Where got?”
“We got them the same place you bought all them quarter horses with mixed brands back in the trees.”
“Take it easy, Hugh,” Son said, quietly.
“We’ll give you one horse for food and a gun with powder and shot.”
The Indian looked again at the horse’s teeth, then into the corners of its eyes.
“Sit in my tepee. We smoke there,” he said.
“We ain’t here to bargain. We want food and a gun,” Son said.
“Wait out here,” Hugh said.
“While you swap off my horse?”
“Only old man come,” the Indian said.
Son watched Hugh and the Indian walk back to the tepee and sit inside the open flap, then he looked at the women who were still staring at him out of the smoke. Their thighs were wide and thick from childbearing, their shoulders rounded from years of stooping to pick up firewood and wash clothes in a stream, and the only thing feminine about them were the fish combs they wore in the tight buns on the backs of their head. Their faces were absolutely without expression, as though they had been snipped out of dried buffalo hide.
Son watched the grease glisten on the venison and drip hissing into the fire, and the smell made his empty stomach ache. The sun was hot on his head, a clear line of sweat ran out of his hair, and his side began to stiffen and throb worse from sitting in one position. He became angrier at Hugh’s delay in the tent and the fact that they had stopped in the village at all. The Indian was smoking the pipe and speaking in his own language and raising the bowl toward the four corners of the earth. Back in Tennessee mountain people called them red niggers, because in the Cumberlands slaves had little value and Indians even less. And that’s what they are, Son thought. Not worth a darky’s sweat.
Hugh stepped out of the tent and squinted his walleye at the hard blue sky. The Indian still sat inside in his rusted coat of mail.
“What did that thief give you for my horse?” Son said.
“It ain’t exactly just your horse.”
“So tell me what we traded off. I’m surprised you still got your britches on.”
“Well, we kind of took the best of our choices in the situation. I’m letting him have both horses. We can’t go riding across Texas with stolen brands on them, nohow. Besides, mine’s got a splayed hoof that ole Iron Jacket don’t know about yet.”
“What the hell are we supposed to ride out of here?” Son said.
“That’s it. We ain’t going nowhere for a while. He give us one of his tepees, all the food we want, and we can stay till we get a mind to move on. Lookie, you must have leaked a boot-full of blood since I cut that ball out of you, and if we keep riding you’re going to fall off your horse and be dead before you hit the earth. You know why he didn’t want you in his tepee? He seen your side, and he said you was just about ready for a hole in the ground.”
“So we give up both of our horses for some food and a tent.”
“There was something extra in the deal. He threw in a Tonkawa woman to cook and tote for us.”
“I should have figured it. You got more rut in you than brains, Hugh.”
“I done the best I could, boy. He didn’t have no guns to trade because the Mexicans took them all away from him. We can’t make the Gulf or the Brazos with you squirting like a broke pipe every time we climb a hill, and he was set on taking both horses and giving us the woman or making no deal at all. Now, that’s just where it stands. If you want, we’ll keep on a-going. But you remember Emile Landry is back there somewhere, and we ain’t going to be worth horse piss on a rock if he runs up on us the way we are now.”
“All right. But after I mend, where we going to get horses?”
“I come up with these two, didn’t I? Besides, Iron Jacket says the Mexicans got an army post about ten miles north of here, and stealing from them bastards is patriotic.”
Son slid off his horse in front of their tepee and limped inside. The dirt floor was covered with buffalo robes and dirty horse blankets, and there was a fire pit in the center circled with blackened rocks. The stitched buckskin hides at the bottom of the tepee had been rolled up a foot from the ground to create a circular draft inside, and the chimney at top where the poles were bound together with braided hide was opened against the sky.
“Take your shirt off and give me them bloody rags and I’ll let them wash out in the stream,” Hugh said. “I’ll get that Tonkawa woman to cook us a whole shitpot of venison stew. I ain’t been so hungry since I got froze in for five days up on the plains.”
“Don’t them Tonkawas live up by the Comanches?”
“That’s right, but they ain’t like the Comanches. In fact, all the Comanches ain’t bad, either. Their women is right nice-looking. They’re tall with long legs and they got skin the color of a penny. Just like that one out there. I seen her when we first rode into camp. She didn’t look nothing like them squat little frogs throwing pine needles in the fire. Iron Jacket said she must have been a hand-blower when she was with the Tonkawas, because they sold her to some Mexican buffalo hunters, and after they come back to the Sabine with their skins they traded her to him for two horses.”
“What’s a hand-blower?”
“That’s an Indian woman that sneaks off from the camp at night and blows in her palms like an owl till her buck finds her. But she makes him run all over the place first. She’ll hide in the brush and hoot, and just when he thinks he’s going to start courting she’ll take off again. It ain’t much different from what some of our women do, but Indians run them out of camp.”
Son lay his head back on a horse blanket and looked up at the blue circle of sky through the top of the tepee. There was a burned strip of cloud on the edge of the sun, and he smelled the horse sweat in the blanket under his head and felt the coarse hair of the buffalo robe against his bare shin; then Hugh’s thick body backed out in silhouette through the tepee’s open flap and he felt himself pulled away into a dream of green mountains covered with poplars, birches, and white oaks, with smoke drifting from the limestone chimneys of the cabins down in the hollow.
He smelled venison when he awoke toward evening. It was cool and Hugh was poking sticks into the fire in the center of the tepee. The draft through the open flap swirled the smoke in a circle up through the chimney. The Tonkawa woman sat on her knees against the back of the tepee.