Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

  “You got him,” Stableforth yelled out.

  “That will teach them,” Turner cried out.

  “What are they doing now?” he said, resting his cheek on his bunched fist.

  “Just looking at him.”

  “Is there another?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be.”

  “Then there won’t be,” he said, and then thought, Now they need a machine gunner.

  Again, he measured their chances of life. It did not look good for the future but right now they were still alive. But now there were two dead and this would be unacceptable to them.

  He stood and addressed his men.

  “We are now the dead,” he said, his voice as hard as death itself, “so fight like you cannot be kilt.”

  He puffed out his chest and strutted across the front of their line. He carried the Springfield, the butt tucked into the pit of his arm.

  “They will come on us in a rush,” he said, his left arm sweeping out before him.

  He knew them well, their love of the shock tactic, the headlong charge a mile over rough ground, then eight hundred yards at full gallop, firing carbines and pistols. In the past the Dorados had paid dearly the fearful toll of attacking entrenched positions protected by concentric circles of coiled barbed wire. They jumped it and tangled in it, the wire barbs catching and hissing across the earth as it rose up to embrace what it’d caught in its snarling trap. Held in momentary arrest, the machine guns short hammer, and their bodies dying as threaded statues, upright and floating on wire spools as if sculpted for memorial.

  As with the ancient Macedonians, the Dorados preferred the moral superiority of close combat over fighting at a distance and it got them killed. It was this moral superiority that so badly winnowed their numbers when again and again, they charged and were entangled in barbed wire and cut down in swaths by Maxims. That’s how they’d come when they came. They didn’t know any other way.

  “Each man, do your best,” was the rest of the more he could say.

  Soon all hell would break loose and this would be a no-good place. The next actions would be motion undefined. Action requiring response. Action lurching off in directions beyond prediction. Knowing when to act yourself. And even then the odds unknown and changing so suddenly it would take a thousand patterns reconfiguring in an instant and an instant and an instant.

  “Come on,” he said, and as if summoned, mounted men pranced into view. He felt the judder in his stomach and snugged the Springfield to his ribs. What a story he would have to tell his brother when next he saw him.

  “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said, and stepped forward. He could feel the pounding of his arteries as they came on at a controlled pace and then broke into an all-out gallop, their ranks serried in their race to the enemy. They rode with reins in hand or reins in teeth and a pistol in each hand.

  As they came on, his wildness flared inside him and the certitude that he should exist and his existence would not be taken away from him. The violence was not exciting to him but simple in calculation and fascinating in experience, and he knew he was ready and would soon enough experience the relief of conflict. He looked to the sky, the paired and silver sun dogs residing there, an omen of the forthcoming. He stepped again, stepped out to meet them. He thought, I am the first and the last and the always and raised the Springfield to his shoulder and emptied the clip. At first he could hear the rattle of the rifle bolt as three riders fell backward over their horses’ croups and two more slumped forward onto their horses’ necks as if a spell had been cast. Then he could only hear the fugue of repeated and interlocking explosions as he reloaded the Springfield and fired five more times and four riders fell headlong with stunning violence and a horse buckled and rushed down to the earth.

  He loaded again and five more of the surging buckled and crashed down into the onrushing earth.

  He watched as one of the fallen, his foot caught in the stirrup, pulled his pistol from off his hip and calmly shot down his own horse that was dragging him. He thought, What a remarkable feat and was proud of the man.

  Still the charge came on as if forever, each horse animating the one next to it, and soon it was a race to his thin line, unrestrained and out of control, and they were crashing into his thin line. With a fury swifter than thought they sifted through them, threw their bodies back, collected their horses, wheeled, and came again, at top speed.

  Turner was the first of their number to be shot and killed. The bullet went singing through his jaw and then he was shot again while stumbling forward, the second bullet nicking his heart through the hollow under his left shoulder. He held on in pain and amazement as the blood pumped from the hole in his ribs and washed his side.

  “Get up,” Napoleon yelled.

  “I can’t,” Turner cried, his complexion whitening, his thready voice, little by little, the last of him.

  “You have to,” he yelled.

  Another wave sifted through them as if a wind and there was the smoke of discharged powder. A rider carried a double-barreled hammer gun with pistol grips and sawed off to a short handy length. When he laid it down and fired there was a short stabbing flame of gunfire and it took Turner square in the face and he was gone.

  Napoleon turned on the rider, his body corkscrewed, and pulled the trigger on the Springfield. The bullet found the back of the rider’s skull and came out through the orbit of his eye. The man fell tangled in his stirrup and his crazed horse dragged him from the battlefield.

  Preston and Stableforth were reloading. Extra Billy, the sleeves of his shirt rolled to his elbows, was stretching his palm flat trying to make it work. He’d been shot through the hand.

  He looked up and glimpsed for Bandy in the rocks. He reloaded the Springfield. All around them were the fallen, the dead and mortally wounded, contorted and silent. All around them the crazed riderless horses, the chaos of stirrups and shod hooves bludgeoning the air and then they were gone.

  The blood pounding in his arteries, he went down on one knee and whistling through his teeth, he stroked the cheek of the Rattler horse. The horse flashed a clean dark eye on him and held his gaze. Softly whistling he covered its eye with his hand. The horse laid back its ears and he felt the lid blink and close. They breathed together for a few moments and then he stood erect and struck a match and made a show of lighting a cigarette. He knew they’d come again.

  This time there came a lone rider, a Yaqui, who rode a white horse naked with a bloody knife clenched in his teeth. The white horse’s small hooves barely touching the ground, it crossed in snorts and huffs from deep in its chest. They watched it come on, red nostriled, its eyes rolling back, its entire body quivering with wildness in its desperate run.

  The Yaqui, smeared with the sweat and foam and blood, rode without saddle or bridle and did not turn off but came straight for them, the white horse red and wet and mesmerizing and instantly was rearing in their midst and so near he could see its eyes and he swore it was an albino. The Yaqui, swart and hard faced and eyes black as wells, had cut incisions in the hide of the white horse, releasing the bright hot arterial blood contained within, and now it coursed the horse’s sides. The white horse reared and plunged, but the rider kept his seat. The white horse reared upward in pirouette, its eyes wide and fear bright, its front hooves pawing the air as rivulets of blood spun from its turning body, spun in the air, spun in their eyes. The blood sprayed from its shoulders and forearms, its croup and stifle. The air was flung with the white horse’s blood as red as scarlet as the horse whirled about and they fought back, bewildered by what horror was unleashed in their center. The Yaqui came straight at him and when he held his ground whooped and flared off to the side and then came again.

  He leveled the Springfield to fire from his hip, but it was Extra Billy, his hand bullet mangled, who raised his .45 and shot the white horse in the head two times before it fell. The horse rushed down to the earth, the quivering animal at his feet, and when it fell he stepped forward and sho
t the naked tumbling rider in the back and chest and in the back again, ejected the empty magazine, and slammed home another.

  Extra Billy looked up, and across the distance they found each other’s eyes. His skin was burnished amber with sun. His eyes alight, he held up his bloody hand, his fingers curved as if holding a whisky glass. He held his hand up too and when Extra Billy tilted his empty hand to his lips, he nodded and drank with him from the curl of his fingers.

  Then they were coming again and from above it must have appeared as a violent storm. Their world was bounded by the loom work of rock, steel, lead, and fire. There was sluicing blood, torn flesh, split bones, and concurrent explosions.

  He fired into a ewe-necked mare as it barreled in his direction, intent on barging him to the ground and running him beneath its hooves. He stepped aside at the last moment as it made its pass but was so close the rider slashed with his whip and kicked out and caught Napoleon with a vicious kick in the chest. Staggering and quivering, he fell back, desperate to shake off the thundering shock of the blow. He could not find his breath and could not keep his feet.

  The fight became desperate at every elevation: men on knees and men standing, men on horseback and men falling from horseback and still fighting, still shooting, still cutting the air with bullet lead and steel blades as their bodies curved and unfolded and knifed to the hard stony ground.

  Another gun exploded off his right ear and he was deafened. He fired the .45 into the massed riders and the heavy bullets knocked men against men, made horses scream. He emptied the clip and drove in another. They could count life in the chaos of brass shell casings that littered the ground. They could count life in the slashed and exploding air. They could count life in the fallen warhorses, the stained and torn and moiled earth.

  “Please help me,” cried a voice winnowed in the throat. He heard the cry, the voice a crying airless falsetto filled with a childlike fear. “Please help me.”

  It was Stableforth. A bullet had cut his throat and he could barely speak. He held his hand clasped to his neck and still his blood leaked from between his fingers. A second bullet shot him through his belly and he buckled forward holding his ripped guts as if swung on a hinged prong. He was making an unearthly moaning sound, his body folded in half. The bullet had passed through his bowels and destroyed them and he must have thought a bonfire lit inside his belly.

  He knew they must see their commander and so he stood in the midst of their onslaught and as they came again in another wave he emptied the clip of his .45 into them and slammed home yet another. At his feet fell more of the horses and riders.

  He looked again to Stableforth. Wide eyed and helpless looking, he sat holding his own entrails—yellow, purple and gray—in the dimming light. He was dying in his passage from one convulsion and into another. He must have known there would be no deliverance from death because all at once he lifted his .45, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  Napoleon snapped cold with ferocity. It was a profound logic that ruled the chaos. He looked up and the dark front of the sky was full of fiery shapes and darting black figures. Another rider came at him and he could hear him by the horse he rode, a roaring broken-winded horse. He turned and the horse was crashing against his chest before he could move. The blow from the horse knocked the air from inside his chest and he was spun around and knocked back. His feet left the ground and he was hurtling for the short distance it took to meet the rushing ground.

  His .45 lost, he raised himself onto his knees and turned on his waist to see the flash of a machete above his head. It paused as if the tipped wing of a steel bird about to plunge. His killer had a gold tooth and a black mustache and wore white trousers patched at the knees. He could see the whites of his eyes and his white teeth. His eyes were black and his face, the view of his mind, was as if a face in rictus.

  His guts twisted. He knew he was dead and was wondering what death would be like when the Rattler horse, lithe as a cat, lurched onto its front feet, stretched out with its long neck and head and took the man’s whole face in its wide mouth. The bite swallowed whatever cry there might have been. It tore away the man’s nose and cheek meat, his lips and mustache and his eyebrows and all the skin and meat that was the man’s face.

  The place where the man’s face had been was turned to blood. He stood horribly crimsoned with the hot blood springing from his faceless head and wreathing his neck and caping his shoulders. Then came his sourceless scream. It pitched and seized and pitched again. It stayed in the air even as he collapsed to the ground where he quivered and trembled, wanting to touch his face but unable to.

  Napoleon called out and turned as Extra Billy, already aware, had made his own turn on the machete and was swung through and aligning his aim for the shot when he was struck by a deadly bullet gliding into his side and it cut him down. The bullet that found his chest hurled him sideways and crumpled him to the ground where he lay in the shakes of death.

  He knew that feeling. He had been shot before, his insides flashing as if suddenly a pool of hell.

  Extra Billy opened his mouth to groan but was soundless for how consuming the quenchless fire that’d been lit in the mangling of his chest. Already his clothes were soggy with blood as it pumped from inside him with each convulsive twitch. Blood crept from the corner of his mouth and down his chin. Extra Billy was a hard one and the hard ones don’t let go easily. He listened to the terrible gasping of the man’s last moments, the tiniest gusts of air leaving his lungs. He was dying by seconds and in agony as his heart pumped his blood from his body onto the floor of the earth. Then he raised an arm as if reaching for the distance and when his arm fell he was gone. Extra Billy had been a good man and he wished for him some swifter means of death, but that was not the one given him.

  Napoleon turned again, searching the ground for a weapon. The place he stood had become a lake of blood and was as if every death and misery in human experience was concentrated at his feet. He caught sight of Preston standing erect amid the ruck of battle. He was holding up his hand and looking at it in amazement. His index finger had been shot away at the second joint. He was then laying down his rifle and holding his arms wide open as if in supplication.

  Their small world was a blur of sound and light and the blood still blooming from the many wounds. He cast a desperate glance to the rock wall where Bandy was stationed. He hoped to see the boy scurrying the heights, the last of his legs disappearing over the top, but there was no sign of the boy he could find.

  He turned again and to his amazement, Extra Billy was staggering beside him, as if half awake, half asleep. His cold eyes were smiling, his skin burnished amber and in his bloody hand he held a .45. Standing his legs astraddle he shot down three men before the guns turned on him again. The bullets shattered through his laddered ribs, lacerated his heart, and delivered unto him the hardest truth.

  Then a brilliant light exploded in his own head and was a suffusion of blunt and liquid pain. He fought against the sensation that was sweeping through him. He cried out his brother’s name, but he could not endure the red-violet explosion inside his head and the light eclipsed and this day’s work was over for him as well and that was the last he knew of the battle.

  12

  TWO RIDERS CAME FORWARD. They sat above him on horseback, their horses’ tails whisking flies. They carried Mausers and sheathed machetes down their backs, the hilts in reach at their shoulders. One man’s britches were torn away at the knees and the other wore canvas leggings from another war in a previous century.

  For all the pain he felt, in his head and body were the promises of pain yet to be experienced as all around him lay the glassy-eyed dead. When he stood, the last of that scene came to him in the faint groans of one of the fallen. It did not matter who it was, one of his or one of theirs, the man’s groans struck upon his heart as a hammer might. So were the last of the screams and sighs and tears and groans of that small place where men fought and died so fiercely. Never aga
in would they rise up from the ground. Never again would they fight on this given earth.

  He wanted to look to the wall. Had the boy been able to climb the wall or crawl inside the rock itself and squirrel himself away? He’d experienced enough such miracles to accept the miraculous as common enough. He hoped the boy was so favored this day.

  Then he watched as Preston stood up from the ground. His head had been cut by blade or bullet and the opening bled in a curtain down the side of his face. He moved a hand as if waving off a fly, searching the air for his shot-away finger. He held his pistol in his other hand and then he let it slip from his hand.

  The two riders indicated they were to take off their boots and hand them up. They tossed out gunnysacks and gestured they were to be placed over their heads. Then they flung out the long loops of their reatas and caught them in their nooses and pulled tight. The braided rawhide was smooth and light but closed tight as a vice at their necks. The riders dallied the ropes around their saddle horns as they directed the turning of their horses and slowly Napoleon and Preston were led away.

  As they stumbled along they could hear as they were joined by more riders in ever-increasing numbers. They were jostled and bumped and fell down more than once, struggling blindly to regain their footing lest they be strangled to death because the riders did not stop. They continued on, the horses’ walk slow and inexorable and fixed in direction.

  Forced to go bootless it wasn’t long before Napoleon had very little skin left on the soles of his feet. The land pricked and slivered, spiked and burned, and his feet stung and were as if set afire and the airless and heated gunnysack was soon a suffocating ordeal.

  “Steady,” he kept saying. His head throbbed and he staggered like a drunken man. “Steady. Keep your legs.”

  He then fell and hit his head and was dragged by his neck because he was unconscious for a time. When he came to, he realized some last and desperate effort to live had twisted his right arm in the rawhide and held on; otherwise he would have been strangled because they did not stop for him and kept going. He was being dragged by the rope over the rocks and through the briary mesquite. Then mercifully, the rider paused to light a cigarette and he was able to gain his feet again.