Friends

by Charles Hackenberry

  Soon as she slid off, she laid down her hat, slipped that guitar strap over her head, and her shirt followed it. And she had nothing on underneath, like women usually wear.

  "What do you think you're doin'?" I ask.

  "I am going to get clean, go swimming," she said. "Come swim with me." She was already unbuttoning her pants so I turned around.

  "Doesn't seem like a proper thing to do," I said.

  She just laughed and soon I heard her walking into the water. Well, that was too much for me. I turned around and she was standing up to her knees, bent over and splashing water on her anns and breasts and looking at me so level and bold.

  I wish I had the words to tell what a sight she was standing there. I saw a white tailed deer standing in a stream once, and I thought of that then, of how right it was for a young thing like her to be enjoyin' the water. Strange, I didn't think before of how her whole body would be the color of her face and hands, but I didn't. Not that I didn't picture her that way, though, I confess. Like coffee with cream that'd turned to wet silk she looked standing there in the slow-moving river. She had got her hair wet by then too, and the drops run off the rings in a shower that the sun caught and sparkled.

  It was entirely too much for me. I took off my hat, which I almost never do unless I'm going to sleep, and then my shirt and boots. I did tum back around to take off my pants and longjohns, and I could feel my face redden when I faced her again.

  She'd waded out to where the water was up to her belly, and she held out her arms toward me. "Come on, Willie!"

  So I did. I guess the water must of still been pretty cold, but I didn't notice much. When I was up beside her, she put her hands on my chest. "How white you are!" she said, laughing the while. I couldn't deny it, next to her.

  She sat her smooth bottom down on the sandy river bed and I did too. Just our heads sticking out.

  When the sun started to slide down toward the west, the lean man dozed and snored, awoke, and nodded off again, dribbling saliva down his hollow cheek. He woke up suddenly and knew someone was there, but when he looked, he saw they were still far out on the plain, riding slow. And they were trailing him, like he knew they would be, following his tracks with their faces down. He put his glass aside and picked up the Sharps, then slid the bead onto the first riders head. He would wait 'til they got a few yards closer, give himself an easy shot. Two easy shots.

  "You do this with all the fellows?" I ask her, making it a joke, thinking I could get her to blush.

  Mandy splashed water in my face with her hand. "Only one," she said, laughing at me. "Last summer. His family, they were white people, all white. But after they saw him with me, they fought with him and then went on to Oregon. He took me to St. Louis. Do you know that place, Willie?"

  "I been there."

  "I loved it there. I loved Robert, too, my first love. We were so happy! But then he gambled and owed a lot of money. He sold me to the man he owed most of the money to."

  I couldn't believe I heard her right and I guess my face showed it.

  "Oh yes, he sold me! Just as if I were a slave, like my mother had been. The man said so after Robert left, but I did not want to sleep with him, so he beat me and then I ran away from him and came back home. St. Louis is not such a nice place if you have no money and no man to protect you." She looked down into the water and wiggled her toes and watched them for a minute before she looked up and smiled at me. "But that is long over, eh?"

  "It's a wonder you can see it that way," I told her. "Best to forget and move on forward, but most folks-"

  She took my hands and stood up then, so I stood up too. She was leaning close to kiss me, like I was towards her, but she stopped sudden and turned her head. "Did you hear that?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "A gun shot! There, again!"

  I couldn't decide if I did or not. For a minute, I thought maybe she'd changed her mind about kissing me and all, but when I looked at her face close I seen that wasn't so. She was scared. We waded out of the water pretty quick and got into our clothes.

  I was hoping it was Clete firing to let me know he was close. "Could you tell which way it come from?" I ask.

  "That way," she said. "The way the stream goes. Toward the little mountain." I looked where she was pointing, the way his tracks led, and far out was a butte.

  I was mighty uneasy heading out there, I can tell you. Not far from the river two more sets of hoofprints joined those made by the girl's paint and my man's limping animal. The new tracks was those of unshod horses, and around here that could only mean Indians. Lots of Sioux still running wild. Some'd settled on the reservations, Red Cloud's tribe, mostly. But I'd heard Crazy Horse and his people was still killing whites over the Black Hills trouble. Just what I needed on this ride.

  When we got closer to the butte, every hundred yards or so I stopped and stood in the stirrups, seeing what I could see up there on top. Not much. Once, when Mandy thought she heard something close, we jumped off and took cover behind a little clump of sage. But nothing happened, so after a while we led the horse a piece-after I got us our rifles. A few yards further on I seen two bodies sprawled in the short squirrel tail grass.

  From their dress and the way they was painted up, I believed they was Sioux, though maybe Cheyenne. No question about it being the work of the man I was following. I saw where he come down after he'd shot them, done his knife work, and then climbed back up. I didn't need to see his tracks to know who done this. He'd be gone now, or Mandy and me would be dead too. One of the Indians had his whole head gone-blowed off, it looked like. The other with a hole in his chest big enough to set a bucket in. And he'd been scalped, though the hair was just tossed beside him, so I knowed double sure it couldn't of been other Indians.

  I looked at Mandy's face about the same time she first seen them braves, and I wisht I'd thought to keep her away from this. It was too late by then, though, and the best I could do was take her back to the horse.

  Before we left, I scratched Clete a note on another leaf I tore from the back of my Bible, tucking it under the one Indian's breechclout, but I didn't take the time to read the pages that time. I climbed on and pulled her up, and we walked the buckskin slow around the butte. I found where he had put his horses, but I didn't want to leave her while I climbed up to see where he'd waited, and he'd already lit out besides.

  She didn't say nothing while we rode out of there, but once I felt her crying some. I could think of nothing to do or say to make things any easier for her. Funny how being with someone who's Indian or part Indian will make you think different about the dead ones. Like they was regular people.

  We made an early camp under some cottonwoods beside a free-running spring I was lucky enough to find. I asked her to unsaddle the horse and make camp while I gathered buffalo chips and a little wood from a big dead branch in one of the trees.

  I got the fire going good, though I kept it low, and we ate some beans and more jerked antelope. Neither of us talked much, but I did tease her into playing her guitar when it started getting dark, and she sung for me in a voice as sad as burying a friend. Her face shone like copper there in the flickering firelight.

  After a while she stopped and just stared into the flames. "What happened to those men, those Indians, that could have been us, couldn't it, Willie?"

  There was nothing to tell her but the truth. "Yes, it could have."

  "That was what you were trying to warn me about, I see now, about being killed. I didn't think of how it could be when you told me. To lie dead out there in the night with the body tom apart."

  "Best not to dwell on it," I said. "Death comes to all of us soon or late, and they suffered less than most."

  She sighed a big sigh and leaned her head against my shoulder. "I hope I die in my own bed, like my mother." She stayed that way awhile and then put her hands behind her on the ground, looking up at the early stars. "My mother loved this land," she said. "She said it was the only place she ever felt real
ly free."

  "I think I know how she felt," I said.

  "Perhaps, but perhaps not, too. My mother was a black woman, Willie, blacker than me. And she was part Indian as well. My father was white, a Frenchman. His ways were strange in Carolina, for he loved my mother. But he did not begin by loving her."

  I didn't know what to say, so I just waited.

  "He began by owning her. He bought her to work in his business."

  "What was his trade," I ask, hoping to lead her away from the sadness that had overtook her.

  "He was an undertaker," she said. "You know. He prepared bodies to-"

  "Yes, I know that business."

  "But after she worked with him for a while and was carrying his child-me, Willie-he took her north. To Philadelphia. I was a little girl in Philadelphia. But his business did not do well there either, and Mamma hated the city. She had grown up on a big cotton farm and loved living things-flowers, vegetables of all kinds, animals. Papa said he was going to buy her chickens and a goat this summer…. "

  A coyote yipped and howled a time or two, and after a while we watched the moon come up.

  "Time for some sleep," I said, starting to spread my canvas so's I could pull a piece of it over me.

  She got her quilt and dropped it on my bedding.

  "We'll get more rest if we sleep separate," I told her. "At least I will."

  She plopped down on her quilt. "But I thought-"

  "I know what you thought," I said. "Even though I told you different. When I said you had to mind what I told you, I said it because I knowed you could do something that would get you killed, nothing more. And I meant it about getting more rest, too. Last night, what with your hair and the smell of you-"

  "You wanted me, then, as you did in the river today?" she ask, leaning close.

  "Why, hell yes! Who wouldn't, sweet as you are and the way you look. And I'm not ashamed of it, neither!"

  She put her arm around me. "Of course not. Why should anyone take shame of that?"

  Well, she asked me a question there I could not answer, and I just sat and looked at the way the firelight played on her pretty face.

  "Is it that I am … not a white women?" she ask, her eyes full of questions. I thought for a minute she was playing a game with me, that she would get me to say I wanted her now or I would make a move towards her, and then she would laugh at me. But looking into her eyes so close, I seen she was just trying to understand how things was with me.

  "Has nothing to do with it," I said, speaking low.

  She waited for me to go on.

  "Mostly, it's how young you are. Hell, I'm fifty, Mandy! And how old are you?"

  "I am nineteen," she said, shrugging a shoulder. "My father was more old than that above my mother. She was seventeen when I was born. And my father, he was more than fifty, I am sure."

  Why, them damn randy Frenchmen! "Most people would say that that's too much difference. And besides, it's more than just age, girl. You have no one to look out for you. No one to see that … well, you are not took advantage of. Like that boy done when he sold you to that other man."

  She took off my hat then and put both her arms around my neck. It's the rich, warm scent of her I remember most. "I have you, Willie, to take care of me. I know you will not take the advantage."

  She kissed me then and it would be a lie if I said that I didn't kiss her back. Only thing I could think of then was that beautiful girl there beside the campfire, a million miles out from nowhere on the rolling prairie.

  I started to unbutton her shirt and she started on mine, but after a minute of fussing with our clothes and kissing at the same time, she started to giggle and I guess I laughed too. "It would be faster if we each removed our own garments," she said, all out of breath but not a hint of being ashamed in her voice.

  "Yes, it would," I told her, breathing just like she was. "But speed is not too important to me right now. I would as soon take mine off, like you said. But I'd like to take your garments off too, if you wouldn't mind."

  "All right, Mr. Goodwin, I will do just as you tell me," she teased. But I didn't care.

  Her breasts was the sweetest things, though of course there was no taste to them, only softness. But so hard was her nipples they felt like stones on my tongue. She pulled my head in so hard to her breast I feared I had hurt her when her body writhed so, but it was not pain that moved her around on the canvas like she done.

  The skin on her belly was like no other woman's that I have ever touched. It was smooth and taut, but it was … I don't know … it was like stream-worn sandstone, too, the gritty way it dragged at your palm. She said my name over and over while I touched her.

  It was a shock how firm her legs was. And they stretched down from her rounded hips a long, long ways. The fur under her arms was curled tight, wirier than buffalo grass after a frost. That between her legs was more wicked than that. And her smell! It rolled over me in waves so, I thought I would drown, and I caught the scent of wolf or bear in it. And ginseng root and fresh-caught trout and cedar shavings and spices, too, all mixed and mingled together 'til I thought my head would burst.

  She grabbed my hair then and pulled my face up, looking at me so direct. "Do you enjoy yourself, Willie?" she ask, moonlight glinting in her eyes.

  "Why yes, yes I do," I said, "but I enjoy you more."

  She sat up some and kissed me, then turned and looked at the fire. I pulled the quilt over her, thinking she felt a chill, but she kicked it right off.

  "No," she said, turning back to me sharp. She spread her legs and tried to pull me between them. "Please, I want you now. And I want to see your face as you enter me."

  Well, no woman had ever said anything at all like that to me before.

  "Slowly!" she cried out, pulling her hips back away from me. "Go very slowly, Willie, for I want to feel all of you enter me."

  I looked into her deep eyes the whole long time, and the pleasure glowed there like coals.

  She begun to cry and make noises in her throat, and then I thought something was the matter, but when I ask her, she only laughed and squeezed me tighter with her legs, wrapped around my middle like they was, like when we was riding, only from the front this time. She commenced to move under me, and first it was a trot and then a canter that turned into a hell-bent-for-leather gallop. My word, that girl was strong, and more stamina than the best horse I ever had. And I had some good ones. Well, it was way too much for me, and I went off like a cheap gun, but she wasn't ready to stop yet, and after a short slow-down I was ready to run again too. She hit the top of the hill before I did that second time, but I wasn't far behind.

  I collapsed right on top of her, not a drop of gumption left. But she didn't seem to mind.

  "Sonofabitch," I said, after a time, raising up on my arms.

  She laughed at that. "And you said you were an old man," she teased.

  "Not too old yet, I guess," I told her. "Shall I go out as slow as I come in?" I ask.

  "As you please," she said. But before I started, she begun moving her hips sideways in some kind of a half circle. I thought I would stay around a while and see what this was all about, and the closest I can come to it is to say it was like a lying-down dance, one I was willing to try. Dance we did, once I caught the rhythm of it.

  But she rolled me off too soon and climbed on top, mostly sitting up. "Relax, now," she whispered, pulling the quilt up over her shoulders. She come forward some, so the rings of her dark hair made a kind of tent around our faces. "No, don't move at all," she told me. "Let me do that. Just look at the moon, Monsieur Rooster, and let your Pullet do the movement. Let your body go to sleep."

  I took a deep breath and done as she said and right then the world changed all around me. The air smelled sweet and new and the moon looked right at me with the most satisfied look I ever seen on his face, before or after, and I've looked for it a hundred times since. The sounds of the prairie night filled up my ears and my brain so they could hold no more.
>
  She was moving slow and easy, but I barely noticed the gait any more. Mostly, I was aware of her body, I think. Of her breath and the feel of her skin, and of the rich scent of her, the most female part of her, of its silk and wetness and warmth.

  I don't know how long she had been making the cries she was making, but I knowed I had been hearing them without hearing them for some time, impossible as that sounds. And then I heard the cries I was making, and they was almost screams. I never felt closer to heaven or dying than I did right then. After a while we lay still, catching our breath.

  "You learned all that from the young fellow who took you away from here?" I ask her.

  She giggled like a schoolgirl. "No, that last I learned from watching Mamma and Papa, after I came back from St. Louis. Perhaps I should not have watched, but what is a girl to do out here?" The fire was out by then and she took a good look around her. "Are we in danger here, Willie? Will the man we are chasing come back in the night?"

  "No, ma'm," I told her. "He's bedded down, just like we are." She give me a funny look then, and finally I saw what she was thinking. "Well, not just like we are, I suppose, but you know what I mean." She laughed a little and I suppose I did too. "After killing them Sioux, he thinks his backtrail is clean. I figure them braves done us a favor." She breathed easier for a minute. "But there is the wolves," I said.

  She looked around again. "Are they … dangereuse? " she ask, saying it peculiar.

  "Sometimes they are and sometimes they ain't."

  "Would they attack us as we slept?" She wasn't smiling no more.

  "Well, let me tell you," I began. "I was camping with a lady up beyond the Yallerstone, a Paiute lady, in the dead of winter. And we was running from her husband and his brother-but that's another story. It'd snowed hard, like it does up there, and we had a nice fire going. Past midnight I woke up and saw a big white wolf, tall at the ears as my friend Clete Shannon. Well, almost, anyways. He was sitting beside that died down fire, right next to us, keeping warm like a dog on a hearthstone. I figured, if he was content there, so was I–and went back to sleep. Come morning, I discovered that damn critter had eat a dozen eggs and a large slab a bacon. That wasn't what bothered me, though." I settled in on my piller, Clete's jacket rolled up. It felt strange being out of my longjohns.