Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

  “Did you pay for your hump?” he said.

  “What?” Preston said, his voice a quaver.

  “Did you pay for your hump,” he said again, but Preston only stared at him, a young man’s thin tight smile on his face. By the look in his eyes it was clear he’d struggled with his behavior and failed before.

  “I was off my head,” Preston declared. “When we return I will make restitution.” Preston then said he needed to take a short walk to concentrate his mind that he might recover the day and with that he dismissed himself.

  “What’s up with Mister Moneybags?” Extra Billy asked.

  “He ain’t nothing but a poisonous tick,” Napoleon said.

  “He ain’t so bad.”

  “He ain’t so good either.”

  “A whore getting cut up happens.”

  “You defending it?”

  “I ain’t defending nothing.”

  “You know what he done as well as I do cuttin’ that woman.”

  “I know what he done. You ain’t telling me nothing.”

  “He ought to be horsewhipped. Do around me what that man did and you will rue the day.”

  “Him horsewhipped? Why, he’s going to be a senator some day. He was created by God, that one.”

  “All the more reason.”

  “The kid,” Extra Billy said. “I talked to him like you said.”

  “What about him?”

  “He don’t understand why we are here.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I tol’ him the army is here and he is in the army and that’s why he is here. But that other one.”

  “Who?’

  “Preston.”

  “What about him?”

  Extra Billy turned his palms to the sky and gave a shrug and he likewise dismissed himself.

  Napoleon lit a new cigarette off the one he’d been smoking.

  Don’t try to understand, he told himself. What seemed so strange and impenetrable earlier in the day seemed to have vanished, but his heart beat uneasily with the sense they should be moving. It pressed on his mind. He tired of his cigarette. He crumbled and scattered it away.

  He closed his eyes for not more than a few minutes, when there came a commotion from the rocks. Preston and Turner were whooping and dancing backward as Stableforth pulled a nesting rattlesnake, thick as a man’s arm, from a wide crevice. He held it aloft by the throat as its body twisted and flashed white in the air. Its fanged mouth yawed open and its tongue slivered the air.

  Turner held open a flour sack and once the snake was inside they tied off the sack and dropped the sack into another and then a third. This was their adventure and they would have it.

  He looked to the sun. The wagons would be coming in with their blocks of ice. Their make-work detail would soon be over and he’d be rid of them.

  “Let’s get cracking,” Napoleon said.

  He pulled himself erect and dusted himself off. He walked into the bush and unbuttoned his fly. As he was doing his business he scanned the jagged rocks that rimmed the canyon, the hour just past the meridian. There was nothing to see and then suddenly a flash of arc-shaped light in the periphery of his vision and to the west, he caught sight of distant riders, one a woman with a parasol, passing ghostlike through the vast emptiness.

  The devil ain’t a man, he thought. He’s a woman.

  He watched them as they disappeared beneath the earth line. He didn’t know who they were, but they were familiar to him, as if prefigured in his mind. There would be trouble; he now knew it and with this knowing, some small part of him was relieved.

  7

  HE STARED INTENTLY through the heat haze. There’d been a movement on the horizon, a vague outline of horses and riders. It went away and then he saw it again. How far? In this country you could see a campfire twenty-five miles away.

  A nerve was twitching in his cheek. He lifted the field glasses from his chest to see if they revealed anything his eyes could not. His nostrils flared as if to learn what rode the dead heated air. He adjusted the wheel and swept the barren sun-struck rim, but there was only dazzling light and empty infinite white sky. Black ashlike floaters within the round of his eyeball crossed his sight line. They drifted and then they settled.

  Extra Billy was standing at his elbow, the smell of sweated liquor a heat on his skin.

  “Speak your mind,” Napoleon said, the field glasses still trained on the far-off rim of the canyon wall.

  “There’s riders out there,” Extra Billy said, his voice a whisper so as not to be heard by the others. “But I trust you already know that.”

  “I do.”

  The black floaters multiplied. They crossed his retina again and settled from his line of sight to the bottom of his eye. The future appeared to him in a brief burst. It left behind no particular event or detail of event, but for an instant it was there in his mind and it was terrible and he felt weakened.

  “You think they’re friendly?” Extra Billy said.

  “If we don’t know them, they ain’t friendly,” he said, letting his hand to flex open and the gesture restored him, but he still remembered his fear.

  “What do you think their business is?”

  “I don’t know what their business is. What do you think?”

  “Playing guess-the-number. Trying to figure how many of us there is.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Where are those fucking wagons?”

  “Not here.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  For the last hour the watchful Rattler horse had been nervous and now he knew why, or rather his mind understood what it already knew. They were not the only riders in the sun-whited country this day. There were others. They had remained below the horizon line the whole time, but the Rattler horse knew they were there.

  “What is it?” Bandy had joined them and wanted to know. His mouth was full of crackers and a scumble of biscuit crumbs were clotted in the Vaseline that rounded his swollen lips.

  Napoleon told Bandy to pay attention to the horses. He told the boy that horses are prey animals. The way their eyes are set in their heads affords them a very broad vision. They will spot and they will run away. Though he was not as committed to the intelligence of horses as his brother, he easily conceded the superiority of a horse’s mind to that of a human being’s.

  “Right now,” he told Bandy, “we might likewise be prey animals.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Just what do you think a horse sees when it looks at you?” he asked. He let down the field glasses and turned on the boy.

  “I don’t know,” the boy said.

  “Another god damn horse,” Extra Billy said, and spit in the dust at his feet.

  Napoleon raised the field glasses again and saw them a second time. Two riders broke into sight and disappeared just as quickly. They wore wide-brimmed hats and carried rifles slung across their backs. They were not the same riders as he’d seen before. There was the woman again. She rode stiffly and carried a parasol. Her equipment flashed brilliantly with sunlight. Silver, he thought, and how many of her was there? That made as many as six riders. He knew if there was six, there could just as easily be sixty. He did not know who they were but knew they were the answer to the riddle of this day.

  “I got no patience for a fight today,” Napoleon said, as if bored by the prospect of an encounter. There was no reason to convey the alarm that dogged his mind.

  “This land ain’t worth the devil coming to fetch it away,” Extra Billy said. “Much less fight for it.”

  “Do we make a stand here?” Bandy asked.

  “No, you fool. We get the fuck out of here,” Extra Billy said.

  “Do you think we’ll have a fight?”

  “I hope to God we don’t,” Napoleon said. The last thing he wanted to do was go into battle with the men he’d drawn that morning. Extra Billy would serve him well. Of this he was confident, but the rest were too green and untested
.

  “Why not?” Bandy wanted to know.

  “Because we will be kilt,” Extra Billy said, and laughed as if the idea of it made him a little bit insane.

  They smoothed their blankets and lifted their saddles. They hauled tight on the cinches, mounted up and they left the little box canyon. They rode slowly at first as they negotiated the thin trail and then they rode hard from the place where they had harbored.

  There was still no sign of the wagons.

  They descended the thin stony trail and broke out onto the valley floor, but the beeves they shot and bled an hour ago had vanished. There was no trace of them to be found, no blood, no hoof, no worthless guts and this eventually convinced Preston, Stableforth, and Turner that there was danger. At first they thought they’d been robbed and they were outraged that such could happen. The beeves were their own and they wanted justice, but when there was only silence from the others, they quieted, their minds unnerved.

  He lifted the field glasses and scanned the vast emptiness of the broken country. But he didn’t need to. The Rattler horse was vibrating with the news of their surroundings and who occupied them. Then he saw them. The distant riders had multiplied and placed themselves between him and the direction he intended. He caught sight of them as if miniature points on the compass of their world. They knotted the landscape in twos and threes. They were to the north and the east and the west and to the south a speck of a man holding a rifle stood over the thin trail they’d just descended and then a second man stepped from the rocks and stood beside him. They appeared and disappeared in the shimmering glaze of heat, as if ink drawn and washed away and drawn again.

  “Who could they be?” Turner said.

  Napoleon let the field glasses to his chest and spoke harshly to the Rattler horse that it ought to be ashamed for its demonstration and should compose itself in a more befitting way. He explained to the men their situation as he understood it and his intention that they should extricate themselves as best as was possible.

  “We should attack,” Preston declared. “Only the offensive is decisive.”

  Extra Billy said that he should shut his g.d. mouth for once, wanting no intrusion on the thoughts of Napoleon.

  Napoleon waved off Extra Billy and pointed at Preston as if to fix him in place. “Having the advantage,” he said to him, “is better than impulse, and right now they have the advantage.”

  He told them they would travel in a violent hurry. He touched with his heels and pressed with his legs and the Rattler horse was spurred into effortless motion. He left them behind to catch up and one by one they did, leaving the stony plain of saltbush and creosote and they rode from the valley floor, their numbers strung out to let the horses breathe, no matter how inclined the animals were to herd with the leader.

  Napoleon’s mind incandesced. Where did he go wrong and how would he make amends? He worked his mind over again and again. Were the beeves the bait and while they rested in the little box canyon the trap sprung? He’d passed this way before when he first saw the beeves and he’d rested in the same little box canyon that same day at the height of the sun. One repetition. Two repetitions. That would have been enough. Where he’d made his mistake was right here and he’d made it days ago. The only question left to be answered was, who would pay for that mistake?

  He touched at the Rattler horse to widen the distance between it and Preston’s gray. The horse opened up and stretched for length and behind him the other horses fell back and then they recovered and ran on the Rattler horse, having no other mind than to be with it and afraid of being lost without it.

  He guided for what seemed a flank, a notched pass in the mountain’s saddle, but the distant riders had their own intentions and one of them was not to give up a flank. They broke for the notch and were cleared and began their descent, but at each turn there were men lying in wait. They stood and aimed their rifles and he veered off, but for some reason they did not take the shots they were afforded.

  When he held up to collect and turn the Rattler horse, it tossed its head and nickered and he chastised it this time for making such wanton sound. The horse pranced about and shook its face. The Rattler was game and fearless, but he knew this cat-and-mouse could not last forever, and he also knew that when you are the mouse you don’t have much to say about it to the cat.

  Preston rode in first, his gray already blown and exhausted. Again he suggested their proper course was to attack.

  Napoleon called down his nerves and blood. He gave to Preston a scornful look: what do you know about such business? This is their hunting ground and right now we are the hunted. He thought to say these words but kept them to himself. He did not know if this was a day that would be marked by death, but he knew they were in for more than he’d anticipated and he knew the odds were swiftly changing in death’s favor. He told Preston they could stand anytime, but for now they would run. He allowed him that much of his thinking.

  The others rode in one by one, Bandy, Stableforth, and Turner, and stood nervous and jostling. In their eyes was confusion, exhilaration, and panic. The Rattler horse glared wildly and started backwards. It wanted to keep running.

  He looked at the green men he rode with. Maybe on this day, a day full of ill omen, maybe at last something was happening in their lives. He knew they were trying to think about ways to think and he knew they were thinking about fear. If not, it only meant that fear was still too deep in the recesses of their unadmitted minds. He knew they were afraid of the bullet and the blade, but more than those they were afraid of being afraid. If he had his way, he’d have them never admit to it. Neither admittance nor confession could lessen the feeling of its hold.

  But Napoleon’s mood was not their mood and it could never be because he rarely saw them as men anymore. He did not know when it first happened, but to him they were merely the beings that inhabited the human shapes they occupied. When they were killed, or their time was up, or they ran away, the shape similarly went away until it was filled again by another. Until that time it was vacant and remained so until it was filled by another being who stepped inside.

  Then Extra Billy rode in. He wore a wide smile on his face, as if instead of a hard ride he’d been lollygagging about, as if all the time in the world was his own. Extra Billy had ridden with him when they crossed the international line in March and together they’d climbed the Barbicora Plateau in a cold gale and almost froze to death, the snow so deep the horses sank in the drifts and had to be dug out. They rode with blankets over their shoulders and they slept in the saddle holding the reins. They lived on Armour canned rations and had to cut away the leather stirrup hoods to resole their boots. When the horses lamed there was nothing they could do except remove the shoes and let them go. Icicles formed in their beards, water froze in canteens, and each morning they awoke covered with snow. When they ran out of food they shot a whitetail and ate like wolves, sucking its blood from handfuls of snow. The horses were so hungry they chewed their halter shanks. Extra Billy was a hard-boiled guy. He didn’t care. He’d piss in the wind.

  Extra Billy’s knife scar was crimsoned and it was as if another smile was decorating his grizzled face. He knew there was no need to rush. He knew they’d entered into the design of another.

  He shook his head at the sight of the man and he began to smile too. His smile grew wide and he could not stop shaking his head—how fortunate he’d been to at least have drawn this one.

  “You enjoying yourself, Trooper?” Napoleon asked, as he rolled a cigarette.

  “Just peachy, sir.”

  “See anything out there you like?”

  “Nothing much to speak of.”

  “Then what do you like?” He scraped a match off his thigh and struck fire. He held up the match and pulled deep on his cigarette.

  “I was thinking about when we got back I’d like to drink my face off.”

  “It’s been a while,” he said as he watched the smoke that curled from his cigarette. “How long has it
been?”

  “It’s been a long long while.”

  “Some days you just can’t drink enough,” he said.

  They both knew the question of how much longer they could run would be answered that day and they would not be the ones doing the answering.

  “Do you think it’s time to order the coffins?” Napoleon said.

  “Nossir, not yet.”

  Napoleon looked to the earth, the sky and the sun. He gazed into the nullity beyond.

  8

  BY LATE DAY the horses’ backs were feverish under the saddles and the hard ride was swelling them. It would not be long before they would start breaking down and then they’d be afoot. But the horses had to last until they couldn’t be spurred any further and then they’d make their stand. He began to search the landscape with that in mind, as escape now seemed remote and soon this pursuit would be forced to a conclusion.

  He knew their pursuers had by now changed mounts at least once if not twice and rode fresh horses. The land was heated worse than he could remember and the sky was starting to twitch.

  The same way wolves relay a deer, they were being cut off and worn down and shepherded further and further from their sanctuary. They should be steering north by northeast, but every time he made the move they were turned again.

  Right now they could neither be taken nor could they escape the deadly game. He did not know how much longer they could last. Success in an attempt to pursue or retreat depended on the experience of the horses and their powers and the riders riding them, and that he knew was impossible. He did not want to fight with these men.

  Cut off again, they retreated southward and when they came to the railroad tracks he faced about. He pulled up the Rattler horse and waited. Something had been decided. The distant riders understood the fatigue he and his horses were experiencing and were closing their stalking distance. Still, their horses seemed to gather heart and were ready to work. The Rattler jigged and bounced, scraping ties and kicking ballast and its shoes set sparks flying from the rails. Its neck rose up like a cock bird’s and it pealed off a long series of high withering neighs. A sign from the Rattler horse, he thought, to halt their flight and engage, but not here, not yet. He knew you had to leave something inside a horse so it could help you when you needed it and the time of need was swiftly approaching. He would use up the horses, drawing their last full measure, and only then he would fight.