Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

  “I hear that.”

  “Will you be back?” the General asked him again.

  “I have not thought about it,” he said, and then he said, “I suppose it depends on what I find.”

  “Do you think there’s a lot left to find?” the General said.

  “I would say we’ve already found plenty,” he said, and the General agreed.

  They finished their drinks and stepped outside into the night. Parked beside the General’s quarters was an automobile, a Dodge five-passenger touring car.

  “Have you thought about how you are going?” the General asked.

  “I thought to hitch a ride on a truck.”

  “Take this car,” the General said, and he agreed to do so and thanked him.

  “Do you know how to drive it?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want a driver?”

  “No. I’ll figure it out,” Napoleon said.

  The two men drew near together, and each leaned in to grasp the other’s hand. They held the handshake and then they stepped back, and his orders secure in the breast pocket of his tunic, he turned and walked away.

  As he made his way back to his tent he made one last pass through town. In the window of a shop the photographer rented were newly printed postcards on display. The photographer must’ve worked all night to have the silvery images of the dead first ready. In the air were cooking smells and the smell of the latrines and coal oil and when the air changed it was tainted with a burning smell.

  At the corner to an alley he heard a faint whistle in the darkness, someone calling to him. He cocked his head and held it there without moving as he sorted out what drew his attention. He turned his head and more distinctly he heard the whistle again. He followed the sound, a young boy, down a dark weedy path that wove between buildings.

  He stopped and listened to the blunt tap of a cobbler’s hammer. He watched a woman washing clothes beneath the laddering light of the moon. There was the sound of a foot-powered wood lathe. The boy whistled again and he knew how he knew the boy. It was the boy who shined his boots. He followed him down the path where he met with the smell of raw sewage and creosote, the stink of human sweat, cold blood, and caked fat. They passed a pair of gaunt and scraggly dogs that were tearing at a wet gunnysack trying to get at what was inside. Another dog slanched into his path on the way to the wet gunnysack. There was a woman milking a goat, its head was turned and its face was in her neck. The woman’s eyes were like wet silver in the darkness and he realized she was blind.

  The boy paused at a cross path and waited and when he caught up the boy moved on, more quickly and deeper into the labyrinth of walls and fences and garden plots. In the light of the open door he could see a woman nursing an infant. He did not know why, but the woman’s look was intent and she was staring at him. She seemed to know him and this knowledge unsettled him. Sitting beside her was an old woman gone in the teeth dandling a baby. The old woman was quick eyed and threw him a nod in the direction he was going and then looked away.

  They traced a long adobe wall and finally came to tall doors set in the long wall where the boy stopped and indicated he should wait before he pulled mightily at a black iron ring and disappeared though the slender swing of an opening.

  Inside the door was a zaguan, a roofed passage connecting the perimeter buildings, and beyond a moonlit yard laid with cobblestones. There were bundles of hay and straw and sacks of animal feed. There was a wagon and beside it a carriage under repair, the rear axle propped on wooden barrels. Somewhere in the darkness, beneath a branchless tree, a bird fluttered in a cage. He could see a candle in a glass faintly burning in the window opening. Then it moved and disappeared and then it appeared again and it was coming in his direction.

  He watched from the door shadow as the fragile light came his way across the yard, low to the cobbled ground. Behind his back, sheet lightning illuminated the earth. It was a young woman wearing a veil and she moved with the dreamy motion of drunkenness, sheltering the candle glass with her cupped hand as she wove her steps across the cobbles. The closer she came the younger she became until she was not a woman but a girl whose black hair veiled her face.

  When she came abreast of him she looked up at him. She smelled of perfume. Her lips were painted carmine and her complexion pale and whited. Her other hand at the base of her throat, she held up the candle glass that he should recognize her face. In the light he could see her red lips and soft cat eyes, but the light was too thin and he did not recognize her.

  She stared at him with a steady gaze and then slowly she reached back and lifted her hair from the nape of her neck.

  Then he remembered her. Her screams that night in the cantina. When he heard her cry out he stood so abruptly he overturned his chair and the table and crossed the room and tore back the curtain. There was a short hallway revealed with three curtained cribs on each side. At the end of the hallway he tore back another curtain and there was Preston. He was standing in the corner, naked from the waist down and he was bleeding from the wrist where he’d been cut with a straight razor. He was hysterical, mute and trembling, for what had happened to him. On his face he wore the unnatural smile of the drunk and terrified. He stared at his wrist as if an evil newly attached.

  Napoleon remembered her cowering in a corner of the room holding a hand to the side of her head and blood was seeping from between her fingers. She held her other hand to her nose where another source of blood was wetting her hand to the wrist. Her face was bruised and contorted with pain. One eye had closed. He found a white cloth and took her hand away. The round of her ear was missing. It’d been cut away from her head. He held the cloth to her wound and then covered it with her hand and pulled her head against his chest, her hand in between and he held her in his arms.

  He could now see the maiming Preston had committed to her. Her cheek on that side and her forehead were still flush with traumatic bruising and this she’d tried to hide with cornstarch. Her face was still bruised and her half ear was rimed black and still crusted with a blood bandage.

  She blew out the candle and reached into a pocket sewn to her skirt and removed a package wrapped in butcher paper and tied with string. She handed it to him, but when he went to open it she stayed his hand and shook her head no, he should not unwrap it, not now, and indicated, Take it away. Take it from me.

  He went to speak, but she shook her head no. She closed her eyes and pressed a hand against the side of her head. She would not talk to him. There was nothing to say.

  He let the package into his trouser pocket as she disappeared behind the massive wooden door and it slowly closed. From there he made his way back through the matrix of paths and alleys to the main street.

  It was in front of a cantina he encountered Wheeler. A number of soldiers were lounging and smoking in the shadowy darkness. Wheeler stood in yellow light in the open doorway eating a sausage off the end of a skewer and drinking from a bottle of beer. Sitting against the wall were men perched on the hind legs of their chairs. They were half drunk, smoking, chewing, spitting, digesting. They’d brought out a watermelon and some were eating fat slices and spitting seeds into the dust. It was another night in the army for them, just like any other. They could see him coming and yet there was no sign of respect for his rank.

  “Hey there, old-timer,” Wheeler said.

  He could taste his blood in his throat. Let it go, his mind repeated. Keep walking, he told himself, but he did not. He thought about the girl. He thought about the grief inside him.

  He began walking in Wheeler’s direction and Wheeler waited for him as he came on. He could not tell how much the man had been drinking. It did not seem he was drunk, but he trusted that to be the source of his insolence.

  “How are you this evening?” Wheeler inquired.

  “Fair. And yourself?”

  “Been better. Been worse.”

  Wheeler bit off the last of the sausage and threw the skewer aside. The men at the wall kept sucking
at the fleshy melon. Swaggering, half-drunken soldiers strolling the streets were stopping to see what was going on. Standing about, sitting in the half shadows were, no doubt, some of the very men they were hunting.

  “Tell me something,” Wheeler said. “Every man I ever knew was scared of getting old and dying. Is that true?”

  “Dying’s true,” he said. He would not fall back on his rank to deal with this man. He had never done so and was not about to start.

  “This country can kill you,” Wheeler said.

  “What country won’t?” he said, squaring his shoulders to the man.

  “I wouldn’t know that. I haven’t been everywheres else like you have.” Wheeler took on a jolly face and a confident smile.

  “Don’t make him mad, sir. He can be mean as a cut snake.” One of the other men had decided to be a part of what was happening.

  “I ain’t afraid of you or your brother,” Wheeler said.

  “No, I don’t suppose you are,” he said. “But I sense the fear.”

  “What have I got to be afraid of?”

  He knew he could not make up for what happened in the desert, but he was in the mood to kill this man if he had to and he was cold to the business of it.

  “You want to shed your blood?” he asked Wheeler. “You try me and I will kill you for the love of killing you.”

  Wheeler’s mouth was finally stopped. He toed the gravel with his boot.

  “Look at me when I speak to you,” he said.

  Napoleon looked in his eyes and willed that he should make the move to challenge him. There was nothing this fight would wash away. This was nature’s work and the malice he felt was not for this man but was from the time before ancient came.

  “You couldn’t fight before,” Wheeler said. “What makes you think you can now?”

  Napoleon took one step and swung as hard as he could from the muscle ridged across his shoulders. It was a vicious punch and under his knuckles he could feel the crush of Wheeler’s nose. The man went down on his knees his hands at his face and the red blood blossoming beneath them. He let the man bleed and then he swung again, another vicious blow and felt the man’s jawbone breaking from its hinge and giving way and the man was lying in the street, his broken face torn with agony.

  Inside his guts he was dry as horn and was as if he willed the instant of pain the man experienced. He wanted it to be something alive that would never die and the man would feel it forever, even after his death.

  Then his blood quieted. He stood over the fallen man in watery moonlight and looked into the shadows of the porch. He took out a bought cigarette and struck a match. Wheeler made a choking sound and then he was hacking up blood from his throat and spitting out the blood. He opened his hand and looked at his teeth and then covered his bloody face again.

  Under the shadow of the cantina roof were the sons of bitches of human nature. Look at me, he thought. Take a look. The world’s full of no-good people, he thought, and he included himself. Nothing made sense to him except what was primitive and vengeful.

  “Put your ear here and listen,” he said, leaning down to where Wheeler lay paralyzed by his pain.

  The man moaned and gurgled for the blood in his throat, from the breakage his face and jaw had sustained. His eyes were pinched shut from the rack of pain that his face had become, but he gestured. He waved a hand in the air, as if he was reaching for something he could not see.

  “You remember me,” he said to Wheeler. “Don’t you ever forget me.”

  Then he walked away and the men came onto the dusty street, into the moonlight to watch him go, complete in their arrogance and their stupidity and their renewed respect for him.

  He chastised himself for losing his temper but not very much. He knew he could not reason with this man and that men like him had to be shamed and that’s what he did. He knew he had abased himself in confronting the man the way he did, but he also knew he had no other choice if he was ever to return.

  He touched at the package he carried in his pocket. There was little point in opening it. He already knew what was inside.

  23

  WHITE GULLS SCULLED the air the morning of his leaving. He packed coffee, corned beef, two bread, sugar, condensed milk, gasoline. He carried in his breast pocket a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses.

  The chaplain had placed a Bible on the backseat. He savored the thought of throwing it out the window.

  Early that first day he’d passed through a long caravan of mule wagons loaded with baled hay and bales of straw and then he was alone on the long dusty road and then coming against him was a continuous stream of supplies and men.

  There was no heater in the car, but he had a blanket and a quart of whisky and after a swig he’d bite off a chaw from a plug of tobacco he carried and this kept him awake. He continued on by starlight so determined to leave the godforsaken country of recent events. His thoughts in these hours, a constant threat to his sanity, he controlled, but admitted he’d been scared of dying and he’d never been scared in his life. Then he told himself: It weren’t nothing to me. And repeated: It weren’t nothing.

  He crossed the international line at Columbus, where massed was a vast depot of men and horses, artillery and armored vehicles and he pushed on from there.

  The roads were local affairs connecting one town to the next, or the road was the wide beaten path that paralleled train tracks. By now he’d come to like sitting in the soft front seat and watching the road slide by. Remarkable to him was the number of people who’d poured into the country since the last time he traveled it. They raised grain crops, herefords, and shorthorns. They’d built houses, barns, and silos. They were a busy and striving people making something where there was nothing and the nothing was disappearing.

  One night he slept in a cemetery, having jounced through the swung-open wrought-iron gates in the pitch of night and thinking he found a park of sorts or the estate of a great man. Another night he parked the automobile in an open field on the edge of a town. When he awoke men and boys were gathering in the field to play baseball. They were staring into the automobile at him sleeping as if he’d arrived from the coming time.

  When he awoke they told him he was in Texas and this he did not know. They asked him to call balls and strikes and later the women came with lemonade, fried chicken, and hot dumplings made of cabbage and pork and they ate beneath a shading pavilion. He determined them a community of Germans of an old religion. The men wore boiled white shirts, black trousers with black suspenders and broad brimmed black felt hats. The boys dressed similarly and the women and girls were equally plain in the cotton dresses they wore. They were pleasant company. After the first questions they were content to not ask anymore and seemed grateful for his presence.

  He came into the grass country: grama, curly mesquite, bluestem waist high. There was an abundance of quail and prairie chickens, sawing grasshoppers, indolent and treacherous hornets, and on occasion he spotted an antelope.

  The light over the prairie was thick and opaque with carried liquid. Dry lightning silently forked in the blue covering darkness. The prairie was being uprooted and turned into a sea of wheat and one night he watched the horizon burn blood red, a wheeling fire on the prairie, and then it disappeared.

  There were moments when he had the feeling there was another beside him. Another who walked with him and rode with him and sat with him in the automobile, an invisible who held a visible presence in his mind. There were moments when he was sure he saw this other, but on this night there were no ghosts of dead men, no shadowy presences, no fears, no haunts.

  Overhead was the quiet gathering and dispersing of clouds. There was the star-bright sky, so clear this night, he could see stars behind stars. He wondered on the dead eyes of his fallen men. He could not shake the proximity of recent blunt death. It was as close as his mind. He waved at the air in front of his face, a gesture he habited to shoo away such thoughts.

  Sometimes the road bore off in a direction that
was not his and other places the road petered out, but rather than turn around and retrace himself he drove overland on the hardened prairie, north by northeast, until he picked up another road that suited the direction of his intention.

  Soon it would be autumn. He thought autumn light old light and come from far away. It was light that was bright and sorrowful and dense and galvanic. It lacquered the world with its brilliance and increased by day, and when the sun set down it left you tired, cold and wanting. He would be home by then. He’d sit on the porch and feel himself not moving.

  As he rolled along he wondered who lived and who was dead. Would he find an old rocking man and a fallen-in cabin? He questioned his father’s ability to die. He doubted him capable of dying, and if he wasn’t, this would be his only incapacity.

  Slowly, but surely, time was curing his memory.

  He started again before daylight, leaving Oklahoma and crossing into Kansas. The road was hard packed and white in the sun. At first he was not tired, but after a few hours he was more tired than if he’d been driving all day. The road was deeply rutted and so the going was very slow. All that day a hot wind blew across his face and stole his breath and dried his mouth. It was no cloying wind that teased and sickened the stomach but a strong hot wind that lifted the dust, scored the earth, and emptied the lungs. But now there was no wind.

  He stopped and walked away from the automobile and onto the land to piss. The absence of sound, of the thrumming engine, was overwhelming. He carried on his person the .45, his tobacco, a spoon. To stand without moving made him weak. His business finished, he walked on, his stiff boots, meant for riding and not walking, galled his feet. As he walked he raised clouds of grasshoppers clacking and sizzling in the air about his trouser legs.

  He lit his cigarette, naturally cupping the match to hide the flame, and then smoked it, shielding the ember. These days on the road, cooking over an open fire had been the most peaceful he’d experienced. Then a loneliness like a mist came over him. He felt it in his arms and legs, a vulnerability in his chest. He was alone out here and unmoored on this vast sea of grassland. He missed his brother.