by Jeff Long
That was when the water parted in a twenty-foot-long riptide, green and slow. At first only the soldiers saw it.
"Robbie King," they yelled at him, "best hurry or that gator come bite your ass."
The army laughed and joked because King's eyes got big as lemons and he started moaning "Oh God, oh God, oh God," and lashing the water to a froth with his hickory switch. With only ten yards to go, the cooper's predicament struck Houston as comical, too, and lord knew they needed some humor. No possible harm could come to King, not from this slowly drifting animal, not with a whole army present with guns.
Several men stood on the riverbank chuckling and, just for the target practice, pinked away at the monster. But their lead balls only slapped against its stony scales like raindrops.
"I'll be goddamn," one sharpshooter said and reloaded quick to try again.
Then the jaws opened like a small cave. King quit his prayer. One minute he was above water, the next he was gone, taken under to another world.
"By God," a man murmured. The hilarity died.
"Robbie King?" one of his San Felipe neighbors called.
King's roan made it to shore and climbed bareback from the water. She took one look around, then bolted north, freed forever from human hands. She'd gained her liberty and Houston doubted any man would ever get within rifle distance of her again.
"A goddamn waste of a man," Ned Burleson said.
"Now what?" Wharton wanted to know. He was looking weak and flinched at the raindrops.
"Maybe Mr. Forbes has another swimmer for us," Three-Legged Willie suggested with a wicked glint.
At that moment the door to the stone hut slid open and the whole army quit its agitation. A man dressed in skins stepped outside and studied the sky. He started whistling to himself, Houston could hear it plainly, and headed over to his woodpile. It took him another full minute before he found time to look across his river and catch sight of the Army of the Republic of Texas stretched out along the banks. He stopped, less amazed than Houston would have thought possible. His head perked a spot higher, the way a squirrel's does.
"Who the hell are you?" he shouted over to them.
"We're the goddamn army of God," someone yelled back.
"What do you want?" Burnham wanted to know.
"What's it goddamn look like," Burleson bellowed back. "Get your goddamn ferry y'ere, Burnham."
By nightfall half the army had crossed to the east bank, with Houston taking the final boat over. He rode up the trace past Burnham's stone hut with a sweet twig sticking out between his teeth and found his soldiers occupying an abandoned set of shacks.
"Light, sir," someone invited him. "Stake out your hoss."
"I swear," someone joked, "the general's mount do grow shorter everyday." Just then, with the pony's hooves deep in mud and Houston's long legs dangling down, his feet nearly touched the ground.
"Who ordered the halt here?" Houston asked them. Deaf Smith had indicated a better campground lay another half mile on. Socketed in a low hollow, this particular clearing was as opposite to defensible as a man could pick. Besides that Houston had resolved to sleep his army of predators as far from settlers' dwellings as possible. But these men weren't budging for the night. Houston gave it up.
The soldiers set to rifling the little dogtrot house and dismantling the worm fence and chasing down the chickens and cutting the heifer's throat. Soon their mess fires were smoking away. Just to break the place in several men started fighting like trappers' dogs over some eggs hardboiling in a pot of coffee. The grappling turned to teeth and eye-gouging. One combatant parted with a tip of his ear. A butcher knife was pulled.
"Come let me tickle your gut with my Arkansas sticker."
"Why you," said the other and pulled a heavy faggot from the fire for a club.
Blood and sparks flew. Men cheered and bet. Someone uncovered a barrel of liquid corn hidden in the brush and they drank it dry. More fights broke out. Some put the excitement to good advantage and went off to claim the best, driest ground for sleeping. Most stayed to watch, grinning with cheeks packed with chew and a glee so primal it came up from their groins.
Houston looked about at these shouting men dressed in animal hides and patched-up rags smeared with red and brown and yellow and black mud, feeling their same muscular pull toward abandon. The soaked firewood smoked and the smoke hung in a dense green pall. It erased their names and faces and made them just a clot of primitives drunk on coffee and half-
raw beef and cold rain and some shared notion of a direction. He watched them and felt like he was standing on the brink of a cliff, ready to fling himself into their violence and amnesia and anonymity.
It always ended like this for him, or started, however one looked at it. As a boy he'd escaped from school and his father's harrowing apparition and the stifling discipline of clerking in a general store by running off to join the Cherokee in their forest. As a governor in disgrace he'd run again, floating off on a raft to mate with black-haired Tiana and live in her wigwam, drunk and delirious with opium and malaria. And when Jackson had tried to civilize him and bring him back into the political fold, Houston had fled into the wilderness again, into this Texas of renegade men and boiling anarchy.
He loved chaos. He loved it more perhaps than any constitution or marriage vow or logic in the world. Chaos had soft breasts and wet fur upon its pubis, it lurked as shadows and cries in the woods and in the rivers, defying neatness and measurement and laws with its gigantic mountain ranges and tangling roots and swift current and its million constellations hanging unnamed behind the few stars that did bear names. Chaos had taken Robbie King off into the earth.
One shout, one lurch forward into the hurly-burly and Houston knew the ecstasy that would take him over. She was waiting for him deep inside the folds of wild roses, in the seep of pure ponds, atop the northern mountains. In these men's savage roar she was calling to him. And all he had to do was lift his voice in answer. Houston could be one with the tribe.
But he held himself back.
"Enough," he shouted to no one in particular and spurred his pony into the thick of the fighting, knocking men right and left. The net effect was merely to reconfigure the fighting, matching men with new opponents. At last Houston lifted one of his pistols, the one he'd carved with a dog's head, and pulled back the cock and fired a shot in the air. His little mare could have bucked or jerked but she held steady, something worth noting if the Mexicans ever did catch them and force a fight. He cocked his second pistol, the one with a carved rooster head, and fired it off, too.
The men paused in their pummeling and wrestling. "Save it for Santa Anna," Houston told them.
That was good enough for them. Bruised and muddy, the happy mob dispersed. Soldiers straggled off to their fires or into the dark woods fringing the hollow to settle for the night. They had raided the corn crib and Houston could smell ears propped upright by the flames, roasting, and johnnycakes frying, and pieces of meat getting seared on sharpened branches. Their cooking would continue far into the night, long after he beat tattoo for them to turn in. Once again he would have to drum them to consciousness in the morning.
Houston wandered toward the dogtrot to see about his chance of a dry floor for the night. But the area surrounding it reeked of urine and fresh human dung, and both cabins and the sheltered gallery between them were jammed with men. No one volunteered to move. He could have cleared a space for himself with a single command, of course, but he was weary of commanding for the day.
He meandered off, working up a nearby hill to find a place to lie down. Sleep would probably elude him tonight, no different from the last week of nights. An hour, three if he got lucky, and then for the rest of it he would just lie in the darkness and let the visions take him over.
He passed through the twilight camp like one of Homer's eavesdropping gods, undetected in the gloom, listening in on his mortals. Under trees, sharing blankets, clustered around campfires, or just muttering to the
mselves, the army spoke to Houston. There was the usual bellyaching about hunger and the rain and blisters, the usual bragging about how fast one could run or hard another could hit or far a rifle could shoot. But underneath that surface chatter Houston heard revelations. In snatches and murmurs his soldiers spoke of their heartache, their night dreams, their demons.
"I left a wife. . . ."
"I married two. . . ."
"I killed a man. . . ."
"I made another man's slave bury my children and he got their cholera and died. . . ."
"I sold land that wasn't mine. . . ."
"I stole my neighbor's hog. . . ."
He listened to them as if thinking to himself. He made their sins his own confessions. Maybe Robbie King's death had put
them in a thoughtful mood, maybe Houston was just hearing them for the first time tonight. What impressed him was how they had quit talking about Texas. Not one spoke of what had brought them here. Rather they talked about what they had left behind. Their imagination was dying out, extinguished by their backward journey.
Not all was nostalgia, of course. Skirting one bright fire, he saw a father teaching his son how to slit a man's windpipe. By the light of another, he saw a man's bare buttocks and on the other side a man's bearded face. Houston drew closer. The buttocks belonged to Three-Legged Willie, the beard to Dr. Labadie, a walleyed healer with a black felt stovepipe on his head. He was lifting Willie's penis on the tip of a stick.
"That's pox, all right," the doctor affirmed.
"Goddamn her," the cripple swore. "Travis warned me she was afflicted. But a half dollar seemed a fair market price for such pretty eyes."
"That's the problem with pretty eyes," Dr. Labadie said. "They can lure strong men away from their chosen path." He threw the stick into the fire.
The colonel hitched his pants up. "Well, the heat in this thing's likely to carry me right into distraction. What's your relief?"
"I'm out of blue pills," Dr. Labadie said. "You'll have to take your mercury neat in liquid form. . . ."
Houston moved off, his curiosity satisfied. Willie's was a confession, too, a remembrance.
It was dark now and he still didn't have a place to lie down. With his saddlebags in hand Houston took care in placing his feet. In moccasins he would have felt it when the roots started to tangle his ankle. But the thick boots gave him no warning at all. The roots suddenly snared his foot and he tripped. He fell to his left and thrust out one arm, wrenching around for balance. Right away he felt the old arrow wound open in his groin.
The pain blinded Houston and ripped the breath right out of his lungs. It took a full minute to get enough air for even a single goddamn. He lay on the cold slimy hillside holding the wound and gritting his teeth. He reached inside his clothing and his fingers came away wet.
Even in the best of times, the hole seeped constantly, weep-
ing a clear rancid fluid. Every now and then he'd twist wrong, and it would pull wide open again and bleed and stink for days or weeks. In the morning, when there was light to see, he would have to go search out Labadie, even though no doctor had yet figured out how to get the hole to seal shut for good. One had reckoned that this was Houston's stigmata and he'd just have to learn to live with it. Usually they gave him laudanum or plain unmixed opium and told him not to twist himself anymore.
"General Houston?" A man was leaning over beside him with a small torch in one hand. He had a pleasant face and green spectacles and city clothes, frayed at the ankle where weeds and stones had been nibbling at him. Clearly he'd traveled here on foot. "Let me help you from the mud, sir."
Houston accepted the hand. His jaw muscles bunched. He hunched over and rested on his knees. Whoever that Indian archer at Horseshoe Bend had been, he was surely smiling at this moment and the thought of it made Houston grimace right through his pain.
"Maybe you should sit."
Houston stayed on his feet, breathing carefully, finding his way around the pain.
"This mud's a wonder," the Samaritan observed in a friendly manner. "When you don't need a grip, the stuff sucks your foot to the knee. And just when you could use some traction, it sends you skating."
The muscles around Houston's wound quit pinching. It felt almost as if the hole were healing shut again, temporarily anyway. He tried easing himself to straight, but the wound caught with a stab and Houston grabbed at his lower abdomen.
"Come to our fire, General," the Samaritan said. Houston gave a swift nod and the smaller man took the general's left arm over his shoulder and they finished climbing the rest of the hill.
"I'm Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar," he introduced himself. His voice had a tenor lilt to it and was pleasant to the ear. Houston wondered vaguely, instinctively, if the man had any political background. "If I do say so, it's a great huge name for a rather little private, especially one still so green to the country. I reached your army just in time for the volte-face."
"Well you reached us in time to catch a general," Houston
managed. He was feeling better now and took his arm off the helping shoulder.
"My pleasure," Lamar said.
Houston tried to pretend his limp was a cautious gait in the darkness. The soldier pretended to be a slow walker. They moved side by side.
"So you have come to fight for Texas," Houston said, just to say something.
"Actually I came to buy Texas," Lamar replied. "Or at least part of her. I'm an agent for a New York real estate syndicate, and I have a bit more than six thousand dollars in bank specie and gold on me. I was on my way to find my friend Colonel Fannin and offer him a partnership in the venture. But this war jumped up, so here I am."
Houston prized the man's candor. "You belonged at the convention," he said. "There's where Texas is getting bought and sold."
"Oh no, sir. Here's the future of Texas. Right here," and he didn't mean this place, but this man. His eyes twinkled behind his green spectacles.
It was a perfect remark, carefree and calculated, one that might have been flattery in another man's mouth. On the surface it sounded like a pledge of allegiance to the army or to Houston or to both, but it wasn't, not coming from this quick little bantam. If Houston had heard correctly, Lamar had just declared the future of Texas lay in Lamar himself. It was a long reach for a private with such short arms, but Houston had to admire the man's pluck. Certainly there were more Young Turks in Texas this season than fleas. Most had showed up with an esquire or doctor or colonel attached to their name, and that made this man with no title all the more entertaining.
They found Lamar's mess in a smear of smoke beneath a sprawling live oak. "Here we are then," the private said.
A half dozen soldiers were sitting around the fire carving leaves of seared beef with their butcher knives and passing a jug that came, no doubt, from the ferrymaster's stock.
"General Houston?" One man squinted through the smoke. "Well, I'll be."
"How are you boys tonight?" Houston asked. He edged his way among them, lowered onto a rock, and draped his
saddlebags over one knee. It took remarkably little time for the men to get used to having their general share the same fire. They passed him the jug, but he passed it on.
"We were just recollecting about an old friend of yours, General," said one fellow with bear grease in his hair.
"Which friend?"
"The late Colonel Crockett, sir."
Crockett had been neither a friend nor a colonel, but Houston tipped his head in recognition. "What was it you were recollecting?"
Several of the men exchanged daring looks in the firelight and suddenly Houston realized he'd come to the wrong place. With a guide as clever as Private Lamar he should have known the talk would be political here.
"It's no secret Old Davy hated Andy Jackson," the man with bear grease said. "No secret, either, that if he'd showed up at the constitutional convention, he might just have got your job. Nor any secret that this army is more than just an army, it's a constitu
ency. Crockett thought he'd make a pretty good general, you know, and a pretty good president, too."
Someone's spit snapped against the fire. It sizzled. They waited for Houston's reply. The accusation was clear. Houston had just been charged with getting Crockett out of his way by sending him to the Alamo. It was a cynical thing to say, as false as it was bizarre. Houston had been off negotiating peace terms with the Indians when Crockett arrived and he'd had nothing to do with posting the poor washed-out dupe to the Alamo.
Houston's first instinct was to attack the slander straight on, for here was the beginning of a mutiny. But how many other campfires were illuminating similar talk? He couldn't answer them all. Instead he kept his expression wry and glanced around through the smoke and saw their eyes fixed on him, all except for Lamar's. Houston's little Samaritan was innocently studying the flames. He wasn't part of this, he wouldn't be, not yet. But he understood everything. Their discontent smelled of blood and musk, a pungent smell that gave away their waiting.
Houston had dueled once, a political matter disguised as a defense of honor. Bloodthirsty old Jackson had personally provided him with both pistols and instructions. Bite down on one bullet while you shoot another. It will steady your aim. In a Kentucky pasture draped with blue fog, Houston had bit, ending the
affair by shooting down an old terrified man. He had emerged with no illusions about his marksmanship or his luck. This time, if he took on his accusers directly, it would be him lying in the grass, turning gray.
Finally Houston spoke. "The last time I ever saw David Crockett, he was bowing to himself in public," Houston said. "It was in a theater in Washington, in some play called The Lion of the West, as I recall, and there was some actor up on stage playing the part of Crockett. It was a sight, gentlemen, this buffoon all rigged out with a bobcat cap and animal skins and a mouthful of frontier nonsense: I'm part snapping turtle, I can whip my weight in panthers, that kind of thing. After a bit I saw that Congressman Crockett was in the audience watching his own image ape around on stage. And goddamn me if he didn't think that was himself up there. When it was all over, that actor stood in front of Crockett and Crockett stood in front of him, and the two of them bowed and applauded and complimented each other. It was a strange sight to see the creator meet his creation."