Chapter two

By the next morning his side was aflame, and a black fluid leaked from his jumper and ran down into his dirty breeches. He held onto Hugh’s waist to keep from falling off the mule’s rump, and when he closed his eyes he heard the rain ticking in the trees overhead.

They were deep into a green woods, and the mist hung in pools around the trunks of the oaks. Last night they had ridden for several hours on a road under a smoky moon, but at the first gray light on the horizon they had moved back into the woods again, and now they were not sure where they were. In fact, in the dark they couldn’t be sure that they had continued riding westward.

Late that afternoon Son heard the cicadas begin humming in the trees. He looked upward and saw the limbs sweep over him, then felt his body topple backward off the mule’s rump. He landed in the wet leaves with his arms spread out by his sides. Hugh knelt over him and bit a chew off his tobacco.

“You just can’t make it like this, can you?” he said. “Look, it opens up down yonder, and we can’t go no farther in these convict clothes. We passed an empty nigger cabin back there, and I’m going to have to leave you there while I go get us a few things.”

“Maybe you better take off, Hugh. They’re behind us someplace.”

“They’re a long way behind us. If I figure right, we’re about halfway to Opelousas, and after that the Sabine is just down the pike. Get your foot in my hand and set your butt up on that mule.”

That night Hugh left him in the cabin and rode back toward the edge of the woods. Son slept on the dirt floor under the portion of cabin roof that hadn’t caved in, and in his feverish dreams he saw a gargoyle face screaming without sound from a twisted chain.

It had stopped raining and the false dawn showed through the cabin window when he heard horses in the leaves outside. He sat upright, his hand on his side and his heart beating, and stared hard at the frame of gray light through the cabin door.

“Boy, you either bled yourself white or I scared religion into you,” Hugh said. He held a cloth sack in his hand, and behind him Son saw two horses tethered to the root of an oak tree.

“Where you been?”

“At a settlement about five miles south. I got everything we need, including two horses from Andy Jackson’s soldier boys.”

“You stole horses from the army?”

“You damn right I did. I took a redcoat ball in my leg at Chalmette in 1815 for him and I reckon he owes me that much. Them soldier boys was drunk in the tavern, and I walked their horses right down the road while they was rolling dice for drinks.”

“I can’t ride no more, Hugh.”

“Yes, you can, because I’m going to whittle that ball right out of your side. Look what I got in the bag. There was two stores down the pike from the tavern, and I got into the back of both of them.” He loosened the drawstring on the bag and took out a huge knife with a bone handle and a whetstone in the buckskin scabbard, three slabs of cured bacon, a wax-sealed jar of honeycombs, a jar of molasses, two shirts and pairs of trousers, two straw hats and a bottle of clear whiskey. “But look what I found under the counter. It’s an old one, but you can put the ball in a pig’s snout at twenty yards with it.”

He held an English flintlock pistol and a brass powder flask and three molded bullets in both hands.

“The flint is pretty wore down, but I’ll still take it over a wet cap when you got to count on it,” he said.

“The high sheriff is going to be all over these woods, Hugh.”

“No, he ain’t. I put them locks back on the doors just like they was when I went in. When they notice something’s gone, they won’t have no idea of when it was stole. But right now you got to do some drinking. In fact, you’re going to get drunker than a bluejay in a mulberry tree.” Hugh uncorked the bottle of whiskey and took a drink from the neck. He swished it in his mouth and spit it on the dirt floor of the cabin.

“I feel sorry for you,” he said. “I’d rather have that ball in my side than drink this. They must have put lye in the mash.”

He handed the bottle to Son and began honing the knife on the whetstone. The knife was made from a wagon spring, and had been heated in a smithy’s forge and shaped and hammered on an anvil until it was as smooth and thin as a metal dollar and had the fragile edge of a razor.

Son’s empty stomach tightened with each swallow from the bottle and the corn taste of the whiskey welled up into his throat and nose and made tears run from his eyes. He thought he was going to vomit, and he set the bottle upright beside him, but Hugh picked it up and pushed it against his mouth again.

“Let it boil down inside you,” he said. “A couple more swallows and it won’t fight back no more. In the meantime, I’m going to tell you how Micajah Harpe had his head cut off.”

The whiskey ran over Son’s mouth, and the back of his throat felt as though he had swallowed a tack.

“You’re a crazy bastard, Hugh. You busted your head open too many times in the dog box.”

Hugh untied the jumper from Son’s waist and peeled the bloody cloth back from the wound. Then he wiped the metal filings off the knife’s edge on his breeches and poured whiskey on both sides of the blade.

“Put this tobacco back in your teeth and don’t swallow it,” he said. “The ball’s worked up on your rib, and I’m going to cut an X on it and pop it right out of there. It’s going to hurt like somebody put an iron on you, but as soon as it’s out you’ll feel all that fire drain out of you.”

“Get to it.”

“Now, let me tell you about Micajah,” Hugh said, and pressed the knife’s edge along the swollen lump in Son’s rib cage. “Him and Wiley was about the meanest sonsofbitches I ever knowed. They didn’t care no more about killing a man than stepping on a frog. Sometimes I tell people about how I was with the gang when somebody’s giving me a bad time, mainly because it scares the hell out of them, but to tell you the truth I’m ashamed of some of the things I know about. That wasn’t no made-up story about filling up people’s insides with rocks and throwing them in the river.”

He slipped the knife deeper, and the inflamed skin peeled back from the flattened lead ball. Son’s eyes were red, and tobacco juice slid from the side of his mouth.

“But Micajah finally got his,” Hugh said. “After he killed some people the high sheriff and some others run him to ground and put a ball in his spine. He was flopping around in the dirt like a fish that was throwed up on the bank. Then this one fellow put a knife in his throat and run it around his neck just like you core an apple.

Son clenched his hand over his eyes and tried to spit the tobacco from his mouth. His heart was thundering in his chest.

“Micajah looked up at this fellow and said, ‘You’re a damn rough butcher but cut and be done.’ When they got his head off they stuck it on a pole in the road, and I reckon his grinning skull is still staring out at people today.

“I done got it, Son. Landry must have melted down a half-bar to make that ball. It’s a wonder he didn’t tear the ribs plumb out of your side.”

Son choked on the threads of tobacco in his throat and tried to wave at Hugh, then he heard the rain ticking in the leaves again and felt the smoky green morning light fill the inside of the cabin.

Five days later they stood on a red clay bluff above the Sabine River with low rolling hills of pine trees on the far side. Hawks floated high on the windstream in the clear sky, and the sunlight was so brilliant on the countryside that it hurt Son’s eyes. Below the bluff was a shack where a ferry-keeper lived, and the ferry itself was pulled up into the shallows and swinging slowly in the current from the pulley rope.

“How bad you leaking?” Hugh said.

“It’s holding.”

“You want to eat what we got left of the bacon before we cross?”

“Save it. I got a notion we ain’t going to find nothing more to eat for a while,” Son said.

“We’ll get something off this fellow down here.”

“Hugh, I don’t want us to steal no more.”

“I ain’t going to steal nothing. You think I want to leave a trail of robberies all the way across Louisiana and Texas for Emile Landry to follow? I’m just going to swap this fellow something for a little food. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into burying them saddles. We could probably get a whole sack of supplies for them.”

“That’s smart, ain’t it? Trading off stolen army saddles. Why don’t we leave our names while we’re at it?”

“All right. Let’s go find out if Texas has changed any since I was there last.”

Son held his hand tight to his side while they rode down the bluff. Hugh kicked at the shack door with his boot without dismounting from his horse.

“Hey, in there, we need a ride across,” he said.

A filthy, unshaven man in buckskin clothes stepped out into the sunlight. His skin was sallow and his eyes a stagnant green. Son couldn’t tell if the fetid odor he smelled came from the man or inside the cabin.

“Damn, what you got in that shack, mister?” Hugh said.

“I got a Choctaw woman cooking tripe. It’s twenty-five cents a bowl if you want some.”

“You keep it,” Hugh said. “We just need a ride and some bacon or jerky if you got it.”

“I don’t run no grocery store, and the trip across is a dollar a man. I don’t take scrip, either.”

“A dollar. Eating them pig guts has hurt your brain,” Hugh said.

“You can swim it, then,” the man said. “But them horses won’t find no ford. Even the Indians don’t cross it when it’s this high.”

“We ain’t got two dollars, mister,” Son said.

“I tell you what. I’ll take that rusty pistol and the powder flask.”

“I might give you something else out of this pistol,” Hugh said.

“No, you ain’t. Both of them horses has U.S. brands on them, and you’re running for your ass right now.”

“Give him the pistol and the flask,” Son said.

“He’s a squaw-man robber.”

“Give them to him.”

Hugh’s black, deformed eye stared hotly at the ferry-keeper, then he took the flintlock from his trousers and slipped the leather cord of the powder flask off his shoulder.

“You got something else to eat in there besides tripe?” Son said. “We don’t need much. Maybe some fatback.”

“You bought yourself the float across and that’s all. Ride your horses down the plank and tie them on the back end. I can’t get off the mudbank with the weight up front.”

They walked their horses onto the ferry, the hooves clopping on the planed cypress boards, and tethered them to the back rail. Son slid off his horse and had to support himself momentarily against the horse’s neck. The ferry moved out into the current, straining against the pulley rope that stretched from one bank to the other. Sweat boiled off the ferry-keeper’s face as he pulled on the rope with his wasted arms; then he walked the length of the boat with a long pole stuck into the river bottom. On the Texas side of the river the swollen carcass of a drowned fawn lay in the shadows, and Son could see the sharp backs of enormous garfish that were tearing at its flanks.

The ferry came to rest in a small inlet surrounded with willow trees, and the ferry-keeper dropped his pole on the deck.

“Boy, you look like a dog’s been chewing on your side,” he said.

“Listen, you asshole,” Hugh said. “You say anything more and I’m going to slice your ears off. And if you tell anybody we been through here and I hear about it, I’ll be back and burn your shack down with you and your squaw in it.”

“I get them every day like you two,” the ferry-keeper said. “All of you are running for Texas to hide in Sam Houston’s army. You don’t bother me none.”

“Is that a fact?” Hugh said, and rode his horse at the man and knocked him against the wood railing.

The ferry-keeper stumbled backward, his eyes wide with surprise. “What are you doing?” he said.

Hugh hit him again with the horse and knocked him backward another five feet.

“Just keep on walking,” he said, then herded the man as he would a calf off the back end of the ferry. “That’s right, splash around in it a bit. You can sure use it. In fact, you smell like somebody painted shit on you.”

They rode their horses up the clay bank into a stand of pine trees. The brown needles were thick on the ground and smelled sweet in the wind blowing through the trunks.

“I should have got our pistol and flask back before I run his ass off the boat,” Hugh said.

“Then he could tell the law we stole from him.”

“He ain’t going to tell the law nothing. He didn’t breathe real good there for a minute when I told him I’d make stubs out of his ears. I should have told him I knowed James Bowie. A turd would have rolled out of his pants leg for sure.

“You knew Bowie?”

“I used to play cards with him in New Orleans. Then I run into him a couple of times when I shot buffalo for the Mexicans in Texas.”

“Hugh, have you really done all this stuff?”

“You make up your own mind about it. But I drank many a bottle of whiskey with him and rode alligators with him, too. Jim was always ready for fun or a prank. One night I played cards with him and Jean Lafitte on Royal Street until seven o’clock in the morning. Jim ordered us brandy and coffee and cigars and then we walked down to a pit by the river that had an alligator in it as thick across as your horse. He got the darkies to haul it out of the pit and then he rode it plumb down to the market and fed it a meat pie in the cafe. But he wasn’t nobody to fool with, either. I heared different stories about him and that knife of his — that him and another fellow fought a duel with their wrists tied together, that another time they nailed their buckskin pants legs to a log and went at it — but I know for a fact he got into it on a sandbar out from Natchez and he cut a fellow up after they already put two pistol balls in him.”

“I never asked you this, but why’d you kill that fellow in New Orleans?”

“Every night in the pen when I heared the boys in the dog boxes and thought about all the time I had ahead of me, I tried to figure out that same question myself. We was playing bouree down by the nigger quarters and I seen him reach under his leg for a card. I told him all that money on the table was mine, and he came up with a dirk in his hand. So I picked up a full bottle and busted his head apart like a flower pot.

“But lookie here, let’s talk about where we’re going and what our selections are.”

The trees had become more evenly spaced, and Son could see the rolling green country of east Texas ahead of him.

“How the hell should I know?” Son said. “I never been in Texas. I don’t know what’s out there.”

“A few thousand Mexican soldiers that’s been shot at by Americans.”

“Hugh, you can really lead us someplace, can’t you?”

“Like I said before, when you break out of prison you don’t draw the best card hand in the world.”

“What do you want to do?”

“There ain’t nothing but Indians north of us, and the closest town west is a good ways over on the Brazos. If we go south to the Gulf, maybe we can get a boat out of the whole damn country.”

“To where?”

“Hell, I don’t know everything. Any place where the law ain’t coming up our ass.”

“I ain’t fond of leaving the country,” Son said.

“What do you think you just left? This ain’t the United States no more. All this belongs to Mexico. And right now them Mexicans hates the smell of anything white. I reckon sooner or later they’re going to burn that ferry back there to keep the rest of us out.”

“I don’t want to ride no boat out of the country, Hugh. Let’s go on up north through the Indians till we hit Arkansas.”

“Some of Landry’s piss must have been on that ball, because you got a fever in your brain. There’s Comanches up there, and what they do to you when they catch you ain’t something you want to study on. When I was hunting buffalo they caught one of my partners and roasted him over a fire. Before he was dead they cut off his arms and legs and left him in the coals. I didn’t hunt buffalo no more after that, and I sure ain’t going up in their country again.

“I don’t even know why I’m talking to you like this. We’re going south for the Gulf and we’ll decide about the boat when we get there. We got almost nothing to eat, no gun, and your face is white as bird shit.”

Two hours later they were following a deer trail along the bottom of a hill through a long stretch of piney woods when Hugh sawed in on the bit and grabbed Son’s arm.

“You smell it?” he said.

“What?”

“An Indian camp.”

“I don’t smell nothing.”

“They’re smoking jerky. You hear the dog?”

At first, Son could only hear the hum of his fever in his ears, then when the wind dropped below the trees he heard the angry bark of a dog violating the air.

“They tie a mean one up outside of camp so nobody don’t sneak up on them,” Hugh said. “They’re probably Choctaws, and that means we probably get something to eat tonight and a place to sleep besides the woods.”

“They’re savages.”

“Listen, there ain’t nothing more savage than a white man. I didn’t tell you the rest of that story about my partner getting roasted. The others with us went back to that village at night and killed everybody in it. They even scalped the children.”

In his mind, Son again saw the bodies of his parents in the lot by the burned cabin. His father’s scorched eyes were staring like pieces of fish scale, and his severed fingers had been stuck in his mouth.

The pine trees began to thin and they followed a clear stream with a silt bottom to the edge of a clearing. A dozen tepees, made of stitched deerskins and shaved pines, were arranged in a circle back toward the trees. In the center of the clearing, strips of venison hung from racks over wet fires, and Indian women were throwing handfuls of pine needles into the smoke. Son saw thirty to forty horses penned back in the woods on the far side of the camp.

“That’s too many horses for this bunch,” Hugh said. “I got a notion we’re about to take up company with thieves.”

They walked their horses into the clearing, and Son felt the wound in his side begin to throb. The Indian women looked at them like statues in the smoke.

“I sure wish I had a drink of that bad whiskey right now,” Hugh said.

“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.

“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.”

“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.