“This is White-Man’s-Woman,” Hugh said. “At least that’s the name these Choctaws give her. She won’t tell me her real name.”
She was tall, with straight hair over her shoulders, and the deerskin dress she wore was blackened by the smoke from cook fires. Son thought he could smell the faint odor of dried animal grease in her direction, like the odor of a coon skin that had been fleshed out and left to cure in the sun.
“Give him one of them bowls,” Hugh said. “He ain’t had no venison since them Frenchies stuck him in jail.”
The woman removed a clay bowl of stew from a flat rock next to the fire and handed it to Son. As she leaned forward out of the gloom into the firelight, he saw the black, hard expression in her eyes.
“You sure you want this in our tent tonight?” he said to Hugh.
“You don’t know nothing about Indians. We’ll treat her a lot better than Iron Jacket and them fat squaws of his, and she knows it. There ain’t nothing worse than being a woman prisoner of other squaws. Besides, like I told you, she belonged to a couple of Mexican skin hunters before she got here, and them bastards ain’t hardly human.”
“I’d sleep on my knife tonight, anyway.”
“I’m planning to sleep on something else.”
“You can’t stay out of trouble, can you?” Son said, and drank the stew broth from the edge of the bowl. It scalded his lips and made his eyes water, but the taste was so good that he couldn’t take his mouth away.
Son picked the meat out of the bowl with his fingers and sucked the fine bones clean. He leaned toward the fire to fill the bowl again, but the woman took it from his hand and dipped it into the small black pot for him. She had a white scar, like a piece of string, that extended from the corner of one eye.
“Some of this don’t taste like deer to me,” he said.
“They put some dog in it. Indians think that’s eating high up on the back quarter.”
“I want to get out of here, Hugh. I don’t care where we go.”
“You’re stubborn, ain’t you? There’s no talking to you about anything.”
“We’ll get horses off them Mexicans, and we’ll take our chances out there.” He waved his arm in a vague way toward the western side of the tepee.
“We’ll go when we’re ready, and you ain’t ready. I don’t have no intention of going to prison, and I ain’t stopping a ball because you can’t keep up.”
“I ain’t held you back since you whittled on my side, have I?”
“You didn’t do nothing to make it easier, either.”
“I didn’t get asked to be taken along. You made damn sure back there in Louisiana that we’ll probably run till they bounce us off a tree.”
“You rather be back in the dog box or listening to a quirt sing down on your butt?”
They were both silent a moment in their anger, and a gust of wind through the flap blew a shower of sparks up toward the chimney. The woman looked at them cautiously from where she sat on her knees.
“The fall’s coming on, ain’t it?” Hugh said. “These tepees ain’t worth wet paper when it starts to get cold. I don’t know how all these dumb bastards get through a winter.”
“If you want to cut it up between us and catch that boat on the Gulf, go ahead on your own, Hugh. I ain’t going to put a stick between your legs.”
“Who’s going to keep you from falling off your horse again? Tomorrow we’re going to find out just where we’re at and see what our selections are. I ain’t too fond of this savage living myself. I had too much of it up there on the plains with the Comanches and Tonkawas.”
“This afternoon you said they was all right.”
“You can’t always tell what you’ll say in the afternoon. What I had in mind for us is more like going on to Bexar and meeting up with Jim Bowie. A man in jail told me that he married into Santa Anna’s family and he’s got more money and land now than an English lord.”
“No magic water tonight,” the woman said.
“What?” Son said.
“Don’t pay no attention,” Hugh said.
“The magic water is bad,” she said.
“Indians think when white people are mad at each other they been drinking whiskey,” Hugh said. “They drink this busthead stuff full of snakes’ heads and tobacco spit that the traders give them, and it drives them crazy. Later, they can’t explain what they done, and they call it the magic water.”
He turned to the woman.
“We ain’t got no whiskey,” he said. “I wouldn’t bring none into an Indian camp, nohow.”
“She must be scared of it, all right,” Son said.
“Them Mexicans that owned her probably got drunk sometimes and beat up on her. I knowed a skin hunter once that made his squaw walk barefoot all day because she burned his breakfast.”
Hugh looked again at the woman.
“We ain’t like that,” he said. “I’d never hit on a woman and I don’t get drunk.”
“You ain’t had a chance to in three years.”
“It don’t matter. The whiskey ain’t been made that can get me drunk. And I never hit a woman in my life.”
“You sure court in a strange way, Hugh.”
“I don’t know why I took you along. You don’t know a thing, do you?”
“Sleep on your knife tonight.”
“That’s what I mean. You’re too young to know the difference between a slop jar and a bowl of grits, but you always got something to say to an older man.”
The last of the twilight began to fade in the trees outside, and Son could hear the starlings and whippoorwills circling their nests. A steady wind was blowing out of the pines against the side of the tepee. The fire burned down in the circle of stones, and the ashes rose and fell in the puffs of cool air through the flap.
“Where you sleeping tonight?” Hugh said.
“Not out there, if that’s what you got in mind. I ain’t going to wake up with them savages eating on me.”
“All right. I ain’t embarrassed by what’s natural. Just make yourself a pallet over there in the corner.”
That night the moon was full and directly overhead in the clear sky like a hard piece of ivory. Son heard movement a few feet from him, and he looked up to see Hugh trying to pull off his trousers from a sitting position. He worked them down over his knees, his ruined face concentrated with effort in the moonlight through the chimney, then fell backward in his blankets when he pulled them from his ankles. He crawled on his hands and knees toward the woman, and then there was the wheezing rush of breath like a bull’s when he fell with his full weight on top of her.
In one motion she twisted out from under him and grabbed a two-foot piece of unburned pine wood from the edge of the fire pit and swung it across the bridge of his nose. He reared upward on his knees with one hand welded against his face and the other trying to push her backward into the buffalo skins. She swung again, this time across his temple, and Son heard the wood knock into bone. Hugh’s walleye protruded even farther from the socket, and his mouth fell open as though his jaws had been broken. There was a spiderweb of blood around his nose.
“Don’t hit him no more,” Son said.
She raised the wood again, but Son caught it behind her shoulder and pulled it from her palm. Her hot eyes looked wildly into his face.
“He shouldn’t have bothered you like that, but he’s too old to take them kind of licks.”
He could see the pulse jumping in her neck, and he smelled again the dried animal fat in her dress and hair.
“He’s too old. Do you understand that? Only an old man would try to do something like that. He was in prison, and he ain’t been around women in three years.”
“What for?” she said.
“He was in trouble with a fellow in New Orleans.”
“You ain’t got to talk for me. Don’t tell that crazy woman nothing,” Hugh said. He sat on his bare buttocks amid the tangle of horse blankets and buffalo robes with his fingers pressed against the swelling knot on his temple. “I ought to knowed better than to try and top a Tonkawa hand-blower. Go on and get outside where you belong. You can stay with them fat frogs of Iron Jacket’s.”