by Bill Dugan
The Comanche pushed away from the wall and dropped out of sight, still forty feet above the canyon floor. Ted was close enough to hear the Comanche grunt when he hit, and picked up speed. Behind him, he heard hoofbeats, but there was no time to look. Gunshots cracked through the thick air, and splinters of rock began to rain down, skittering across the rocky face of the cliff like stone spiders.
Ted could no longer see the Indians above him, but they were returning fire at the charging riders behind him. The Comanche from the wall reappeared, limping now, and Ted broke toward the left, trying to head him off before he found Tommy. The brave stopped long enough to fire once, then dodged behind a rock.
Hitting the ground, he lay there panting for a moment, trying to catch his breath. He couldn’t see the Comanche, and with the ruckus behind him, there was no chance of hearing him, either. He got to his feet and raised the carbine, but there was nothing to shoot at.
He could see the boulders where Dawson lay now, but there was no sign of the Indian. The firing above him had stopped, but a howl echoed through the canyon, and he turned to see more than a dozen Comanches on the far rim. They opened up all at once. He dove to the ground again, but the Indians weren’t shooting at him. The hoofbeats had stopped, and Ted knew Johnny and the other hands had dismounted. They started shooting at the Indians behind them, and Ted turned his back. He saw the Comanche now, poised on a boulder.
Ted snapped a shot from the Winchester, but it missed badly, and the Indian jumped to another rock. He teetered a moment, and Ted could see the blood streaming from a bad gash on the Comanche’s thigh.
He fired twice more, the second time just as the Indian dropped out of sight. The bullet slammed into the wall, waist high where the Indian had been. Ted scrambled through the heavy brush. A thorn ripped his right sleeve from the elbow to the cuff as he charged past. He closed on the crevice. The Comanche stood there, straddling Dawson, who held one hand up in front of his face.
Ted took a step forward, then froze. The Indian sensed him and turned. For a moment, he stood still, his painted face hovering over his shoulder, as if waiting to see what Ted would do. Footsteps sounded behind him, and he turned to see Johnny charging toward him.
“Shoot him, dammit, what are you waiting for?”
The Indian, released by the shout, raised his right hand. Ted could see the knife as it caught the setting sun, glittering like gold for a split second. He fired as the arm started down. Johnny brushed past him, emptying his revolver at the crouching Comanche.
The knife slid from his fingers and clattered on the stone. Dawson cried out as Johnny charged into the crevice, with Ted on his heels.
“Bastard,” Johnny shouted, grabbing the Indian by the shoulders and hurling him backward. His head slammed into a rock and Johnny dove on him. He jerked the brave’s head up and slammed it again into the rock, then again, and a third time.
“Stop it, Johnny! He’s dead, stop it …”
Ted grabbed at his brother and tried to tear him away, but Johnny turned and swung at him. He snatched at the knife and plunged it into the Comanche’s throat, ripping the blade sideways, then plunging it in again.
Ted wrestled him away from the dead Comanche, but Johnny flung him aside. Panting, his right hand covered with blood, he stared at his brother.
“You damned coward. He could have killed Tommy. Why didn’t you shoot him?”
“I did, dammit. I did shoot him.”
“What the hell took you so long?” Johnny pushed past him and headed back across the canyon floor. He didn’t look back. Dawson lay there moaning. He stared at Ted with confusion and disappointment in his eyes. Then he shook his head and turned away.
Ted wanted to say something, but he couldn’t find the words. He turned to follow Johnny back into the chaparral. With the carbine dangling from one hand, he ran straight up. The Comanches on the rim spotted him and started firing. He ignored the slugs whistling past him, kicking up spouts of sand on either side.
Just ahead, he could hear the hands firing sporadically at the rim. By the time he reached the other hands, the Comanches on the rim had started to break off the attack. Once the surprise failed, they weren’t interested. Johnny and Rafe and the others chewed at the rimrock until their guns were empty.
Johnny turned as Ted finished reloading his own weapon. “What the hell are you doing here? Why didn’t you stay with Dawson?”
“I thought I was needed here.”
“Yeah, well … It’s over.” Johnny spat into the dry ground, grinding the damp spot under the toe of one boot. “No thanks to you, neither.”
“Let him alone, Johnny,” Rafe said.
Johnny glared at the older man. “Rafe, butt out. This is family business. Understand? This is between me and Ted.”
“I only meant you should …”
Johnny interrupted him. “I don’t give a damn what you meant, Rafe. I know what you meant, but I don’t give a damn.”
Rafe shrugged his shoulders. “Have it your way, son.”
Without another word to his brother, Johnny shouted to the hands, strung out in a crooked line among the thickets. “Back to work, you lazy bastards. We got some beeves to round up.”
Rafe watched him as he stalked away, then turned to Ted. “That boy’s heading for trouble, Teddy. You keep an eye on him, will you?”
Ted nodded. “If he lets me.”
“Don’t pay that no mind. He didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“The hell he didn’t, Rafe.”
3
TED COTTON SAT on the front porch, hacking at a cottonwood branch as thick as his wrist. The sun was sinking as Johnny pushed through the rusty screen door out onto the porch.
He looked at his brother for a long time without saying anything. Ted continued to slice curls off the cottonwood without acknowledging his brother. In the evening quiet, the only sound was the whisper of the steel through the soft wood and softer bark. Each curl fell into his lap as he rocked, occasionally pushing himself with one leg braced against the porch railing.
Johnny dropped to the top step and leaned against the column of bleached wood holding up the roof. He tugged one heel under him and stretched the other leg across the top of the steps. He lit a cigarette, then tossed the match away with a snap of his wrist. Ted glanced at him, and at the tight stream of exasperated smoke swirling away on the breeze.
“You ain’t gonna say anything at all, are you?” Johnny asked.
Ted didn’t answer right away.
“Because if you ain’t, then maybe you ought to just listen. Sit there and hack at that damn wood and listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“I don’t want to be here no more.”
“This spread?”
“Texas.”
“I thought you liked it here.”
“I thought you was my brother.”
“I am.”
“Don’t seem like it. Don’t seem to me like any brother of mine, any son of my daddy for that matter, would’ve done what you done yesterday.”
“Which was …?”
“Stand there and watch a goddamned Comanche come within a cunt hair of slitting your best friend’s throat. That ain’t no brother of mine done that, I swear.”
“I killed the man, didn’t I?”
“What? Oh, hell yes, you killed him. Just about barely, though. I didn’t come along, maybe you wouldn’t have done it even then, which as it was was almost too damn late for Tommy Dawson.”
“That what he said?”
“No, that ain’t what he said. Tommy ain’t said nothing at all about it. That don’t mean he ain’t thinking about it though, I guarantee.”
Ted whittled for a while before answering. “Where you going to go?”
“I get another couple hundred cows, I believe I might take ‘em on up to Kansas, see can I find someplace I like better’n here.”
“You want me to go with you?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Sounds to me like you wish I wasn’t your kin. That bein’ so, maybe you’d like it just fine if I was to stay here.”
Johnny sucked on the cigarette, looked at it in disgust, and tossed it into the yard. “Don’t go stupid on me, Teddy. You’re my brother. Nothing can change that. I wouldn’t mind if something was to change you, but I can’t help that. Hell, I don’t know, maybe you can’t, neither.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it means. It also means I got to be sure you can pull your own weight, you come along with me. It means I got to be able to tell Tommy and Rafe they don’t have to worry if you’re along and we run into some goddamned redskins.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You do that …” Johnny got up and walked off the porch. Ted watched him stalk toward the barn, digging his heels in harder than necessary, as if he were trying to scrape something off his boots.
He disappeared into the rickety barn, then reappeared with a saddle over his shoulder. Ted watched as the older man saddled his pinto pony, then swung into the stirrups with a practiced ease.
He whittled a little faster until Johnny was gone out of sight, then stuck the knife into the rail and stood up. The shavings spilled onto the weather-beaten porch floorboards and crinkled under his feet as he stepped to the screen door. Inside, he went to his room and closed the door. Red light from the west spilled into the room as he sat on his lumpy mattress. It stained his hands, and he stared at the bloody-looking fingers, curling them this way and that, interlacing them, then tugging them apart again.
When the sun finally slipped below the horizon, and the red light was gone, he reached for his gun-belt, strapped it on, and left the house. He saddled his own pony, mounted up, and walked the horse past the bunkhouse.
Rafe MacCallister was sitting outside. Ted could see the ember of a cigarette end in the shadows.
“Late to be goin’ for a ride, ain’t it, son?”
“Never too late for anything, Rafe.”
“Wish that was so, Ted, wish that was so.”
“See you later, Rafe.”
“Where you going?”
“I need to think a little bit.”
“You be careful, boy. Them Comanches will likely be looking to get even. They don’t like to lose.”
“You tell Johnny that just now?”
“Course I did. Why wouldn’t I?”
Ted nodded, then kicked his pony into a slow trot. He waved his hat, knowing that Rafe probably couldn’t see him, but wanting to acknowledge the old man anyway. And he knew very well where he was going. There was little doubt in his mind that Rafe also knew. But some things were unnecessary to say while others were better left unsaid. In this case, it was a little of both, unnecessary to tell Rafe, and just as well unsaid as far as his brother was concerned.
Riding through the dark and peaceful countryside, he concentrated on his pony’s hoofbeats, the way a man waiting for something will concentrate on a clock. It sometimes seemed he knew exactly how many strides of his pony it would take to get from one place to another. That was a consequence, he knew, of his rather limited inclination to move any great distance from the house, except when work required it. And when he did go, there were few places he was willing to go.
Unlike Johnny and the other hands, he avoided San Pedro. He was not a great drinker, and there were only two reasons to visit the town. Both involved whiskey. One of them also involved women who were less than scrupulous about the company they kept, and the degree of intimacy with which they kept it. For that matter, they seemed unconcerned about the frequency, as well.
Ted knew that he had been changed by what happened at Shiloh. He still had nightmares. They squeezed him in the dark like a fistful of giant fingers crushing his chest. He would wake up gasping for air, soaked in sweat and thrashing around in his bed like a man on fire. And without exception, the nightmares stopped just short of his own death. He would find himself staring into the muzzle of a Yankee musket. He could see the musket ball, just beginning to emerge from the barrel of the gun. Its surface was rough, pitted like the moon through his father’s old telescope.
He’d had that one a hundred times, maybe a thousand. But they were all variations on the same theme. The smell was what lingered. He would wake up with the smell of blood and voided bowels so thick in the air it felt as if he were trying to swim across a glue pot. Everything tugged at him. His movements were sluggish to the point of futility. Great strings of red mucilage pulled at his arms as he tried to raise them above the surface, crawling for his life through a fluid too thick to let him drown, but too strong to let him go. And those first few minutes never failed to take a lifetime.
His breathing would be labored for an hour. He was forced to lay there in the dark, unwilling, even unable, to close his eyes. What he saw in the dark was too plain, and too horrible, to stand.
But he blamed himself. He thought it must be some weakness in him, some hidden flaw. Johnny had been there with him, but he seemed, if anything, tougher since Shiloh, not softer. What had begun to eat at him like invisible rust had tempered Johnny. What was toughness in his brother had become, according to some, including Rafe, a mean streak. Maybe Johnny had handled it the right way. And that uncertainty made his own reaction even harder to bear.
Ted eased his horse back into a walk, letting the pony wander without direction. As they approached the San Pedro Creek, the animal stopped to pull at some foot-high grass, munching contentedly a few moments after each mouthful before moving on a few yards to the next clump of grass. At this rate, he knew, it would take him hours to get where he was going. But that was a blessing. At least he wouldn’t have to face the horrors of sleep.
After two hours, the moon rose above the horizon, its pale silver light spilling through the scattered trees and glistening on the water. At places where rocks broke the surface of the slow-moving stream, the turbulence burbled and reflected the light in patches of cold, white fire. He was only dimly aware of them, like landmarks too familiar to be noticed.
When the first glimpse of light bobbed into view across the creek, he tugged his pony away from its careless grazing and poked it with his knees. The pony shook him off once, then broke into a trot again. He sawed on the reins, urging the animal into the water and across the creek. He could feel the water rise just above his boots. Usually he would hoist his feet up above the water, but this time he was too preoccupied to care. He felt the creek pour into his boots, and when the pony finally climbed out on the opposite bank, he could hear the water sloshing in them. It sounded like maracas full of damp seeds, squishing dully as his legs rose and fell with the rhythm of the pony’s gait.
The horse seemed to sense his anxiety and pulled against the reins, trying to take its head. The light grew a little brighter, then stayed steady as the house in which it sat grew slowly more substantial. Ted had no idea of the time, but he gave no thought to turning back. He couldn’t, not now, not tonight. He needed to talk to someone who would understand, someone with whom he could share the conflicting emotions churning inside him.
He could see the house clearly now and kicked the horse a little to urge it forward. He skidded to a halt in front of a sun-bleached hitching post and flicked the reins. They wound around the post on their own, and he fashioned a quick half hitch to keep them secure, then mounted the stairs, trying to muffle the sound of his feet on the wooden steps.
The screen door swung open as he climbed the last step. He could see her outlined against the dull glow of the lamp from the living room behind her. She held one hand to her mouth, as if she had been chewing on her knuckles.
“Sorry it’s so late, Ellie.”
“Thank God you’re alright, Ted. I was so worried. Everybody was talking about it. I didn’t know what to think.”
“I still don’t. Is your father awake?”
“No, Daddy’s gone to bed. I’ll wake him if you want.”
“No, t
hat’s alright.”
She moved to a swing suspended from the porch roof beams. Patting the seat beside her, she said, “Sit here.”
“No, I don’t think I can sit still. I’ll just sit on the railing.” He hoisted himself up and balanced precariously on the rail, careful to avoid splinters from the dry, split oak of the banister.
He watched her in the near dark as she glided back and forth. She seemed to disappear in the shadows for a moment, then float toward him. Just when it seemed she was close enough to reach out and touch, she started back, to disappear again a few seconds later.
“Johnny’s leaving,” he said.
“What? To go where? How can he?”
“Says he wants to take a herd up north. Says he can’t stand Texas anymore.”
“You going with him?” she asked. He could tell by the edge in her voice what she wanted to hear.
“I don’t think he wants me to.”
“What do you want? That’s more important.”
“No, it isn’t. Nothing’s more important than family. But if I want to go, and he doesn’t want me along, seems like I have no right to go.”
“He’s your brother.”
“I know that. But it doesn’t change anything.”
“But…”
“I don’t think I want to talk about it, Ellie. Not now. Not yet. If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to be here without talking.”
“I’ll make some coffee. I think it’s going to be a long night.”
4
THE HERD HAD swollen to nearly three thousand head, most of them rawhide tough and stringy. Johnny was talking about getting some English white faces when he got north, but that took money, and the herd was the family fortune. Night riding, Ted had a lot of time to think. He still hadn’t told Johnny whether he would go, and Johnny hadn’t asked. For that, Ted didn’t know whether to be grateful or resentful.
Rafe kept watching him, as if he expected some sort of transformation. But Ted wasn’t changing. Not that he knew of, anyway. He did his job and kept away from the other hands, sleeping during the day while they tried to round up a few hundred more. Johnny had taken a half-dozen men over the border into Mexico, but he came back with almost as many exhausted horses as he did cows. He wouldn’t talk about it, but it appeared they had narrowly missed getting bushwhacked by a bunch of Mexicans and had to leave nearly three hundred cows behind.