by Sarah Bird
“Yessir, I am,” Wager answered, never once glancing Drewbott’s way. “It’s our only chance for survival. There are no marked water sources south from here to the Rio Grande.”
Drewbott lowered his head, held his hands behind his back, and paced back and forth, muttering, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” like he was considering what Wager and John Horse had said. Of a sudden, he halted, raised his head, pointed at Wager and ordered, “Lieutenant Meinzer, Captain Grundy, seize this enemy agent prisoner. Vikers, Caldwell, Greene, seize the Indians.”
Hands were laid upon Wager and the Seminoles.
“This treasonous conspiracy,” Drewbott sputtered, “must be stopped. We won’t be led by these traitors into an ambush. The prisoners are to be kept under watch at all times. During the day, their hands are to be tied in such a way that they can still ride. At night, they will be bound, hand and foot.
“As for the rest of you,” he screamed at us. “Colonel Ednar Drewbott promises that justice will be swift for traitors and deserters. There will be no questions asked and no mercy shown. Wherever you run, I will send the strongest men with the most powerful weapons to hunt you down and shoot you like the treasonous dogs you are. Take the prisoners away.”
Wager, John Horse, and the others were bound and rudely led off. Drewbott hollered after them, “Put three men on Allbright. White men. He’s the ringleader of this mutiny. He’s the dangerous one.”
Chapter 78
Sleep was fitful that night. Men coughed and panted hard as dogs trying to cool themselves. The moon was so diamond bright that the ocotillos threw shadows like spiders crawling across the sand. I woke Lem and whispered to him, “We have to go for water.”
“How’s that?”
“There is water to the west. A spring. I saw it, just didn’t mark it down right. But it’s there.”
“You talking desertion?” Lem asked. “They’ll hang us.”
“Rather go that way than dying of thirst. What you say?”
“Tonight?”
“Have to. Drewbott’s bound on killing the Sergeant. Lem, no two ways about it, you stay, you will die.”
Lem nodded.
“Good. Soon as I can set the Sergeant free, be ready to jump up and dust. I’ll watch for the officers guarding him to drop off.”
And, while Lem slept, that is what I did. But the three officers must have had orders from Drewbott to keep up a constant guard. Each one took duty, switching off every couple of hours. Halfway through the night, Lem woke and said he’d take a turn. I closed my eyes and dropped off.
I woke a few hours later and found Lem snoring with his mouth open, John Horse and his men gone, and Wager staring at me from between the officers lying fast asleep beside him. Though a dozen sleeping men, one smoking fire, and several clumps of prickly pear separated us, I raised my hands, my wrists held together, then separated them and pointed at him. He nodded, understanding that I meant to free him and held up three fingers, then laid his head to the side upon his hands and shut his eyes. I nodded that I understood: the guards slept at three.
At breakfast, the greenhorns who’d been without good water the longest tried to eat hardtack, but they were too dry to swallow. They opened their mouths and the crumbs fell out, parched as cornmeal.
Convinced that he was following the savages to water, Drewbott led us farther south. Soon, the rocky ground gave way to sandy soil that was exhausting to move through. The horses were close to giving out. Hoping to spare our mounts, we continued afoot. Our progress slowed even more, as we shuffled along, heads drooping, feet dragging. All that long day, I kept my eyes on Wager, riding up ahead in front of his guards, my spirits lifted by knowing that tonight we were leaving.
We walked on. Few spoke for our tongues had swollen in our mouths. No one had made water for the past day. Several of the new recruits were staggering like they were drunk. Two men fell out and had to be slung across their saddles.
We followed the clear, deep tracks of the Indian ponies leading us ever farther south. I snapped to every now and again and found that I’d slept while I marched along. At the edge of a dry arroyo, Baby King’s mare staggered and slid down into the ravine. Without making the slightest nicker, she came to rest on her side and made no effort to stand. Just lay there in a heap, panting hard.
Baby King scrambled down the slope after her. He hung on to either side of her throatlatch and tried to tug the downed horse to her feet, pleading, “Get up, hoss. Come on, please,” and repeated what we all knew, “Man afoot’s a dead man out here, you know that. Come on, baby, please.”
The mare wouldn’t budge. When Baby King turned loose of her, the mare’s big head dropped down and she lay there, dust puffing up with every big exhalation. She closed her eyes and her breathing slowed and grew shallow. She was laying on Baby King’s carbine, so I gave him the loan of mine. I walked away as fast as I could, but that shot was still the loudest one I had ever heard. I thought of Bunny and hoped that Fernie had made good on his word to let her go gentle. I was glad now that she hadn’t come. Man or beast, thirst is a terrible way to die.
Late that afternoon, we made another dry camp. I told Lem that we’d move out at three next morning when Wager had said the guards would be asleep. We all lay huddled up in whatever shade we could find or make and waited out the long hours until our enemy, the sun, left the sky. Lem and I slept a bit. The stars, when they finally appeared, seemed frozen instead of wheeling across the sky as they usually did, while I counted down the minutes until Wager and I would be free.
I watched the first two officers guarding Wager do their tours. The third guard barely had enough strength to sit up when they shook him awake. After only a few minutes, he went to listing to one side, then the other, and I knew it wouldn’t be long. My blood, thick and sludgy as it was, jumped in my veins as I took a grip on my knife. The instant he tumped over, I’d have those ropes sawed off Wager, and the three of us would be gone. At last, he tipped over to one side and did not sit back up. I moved into a crouch and made my way through the sleeping camp. Wager saw me coming and heaved himself up into a sitting position. I was poleaxed by the sight of his face flooded with moonlight and stumbled, kicking a rock that pinged off of Vikers’s coffeepot. I held my breath, but no one moved and the snoring went on uninterrupted.
Wager raised his hands, beckoning me to cut him loose. I knelt beside him. My blade was on the rope when a shrill blast cut the air. Behind me, the bugler had found the spit to sound “Boots and Saddles,” the order for us to mount up.
“Get away,” Wager hissed.
“I’ll try again tonight,” I promised, backing away.
Vikers, Drewbott standing behind him, croaked out, “Colonel says to mount up if your horse is fit. We’re going to backtrack. Head back to the mud seeps at Playa del Oro.”
In the darkness, with no one’s face exposed, the men grumbled loudly, the threat of death causing them, for the first time, to question an order.
Go back to that mudhole? That’s crazy.
We’ll never make it.
Ought to stay right here and send out a rescue party.
Need to get the best horses, best riders, have them tear ass down to the Rio, bring water back.
“The next man who opens his mouth,” Drewbott tried to yell, but his voice was weak and thready. “Will be hung for insubordination.”
He stared at us, panting, his eyes wild, his words raspy. “I am fed up trying to command you gorillas in uniform. It’s not possible. No one can do it. Do you think I want to be here? Do you think I wanted to throw away my career and risk my life for a bunch of niggers?” A sob rose up and choked him off. Drewbott turned away, pretending to be having a coughing fit.
Everyone’s eyes popped open at the sound of the commander, the man responsible for getting us back alive, breaking down. For a lot of the plantation boys, whose every breath until then had been dictated by a white boss, it was a new and terrifying experience to see the one that their lives depended
on even more lost than they were.
Carter, Grundy, and the other white officers traded glances as the “coughing” fit went on. And on. When Carter saw that Drewbott wasn’t getting hold of himself, he stepped forward and quietly ordered us to prepare to move out. We would march in the cool of the night.
Trying to cover for his weakness, Drewbott drove us hard through the dark night as we backtracked along the trail. Men fell and no one was dispatched to stay and care for them or even to make a note of their positions. They were abandoned. Panic gripped the troopers as they realized it was every man for himself. For the first time, they started talking the mutiny that Drewbott had lived in fear of since his first peek at us. The men abandoned Vikers and clustered behind Wager, following him like he was Moses who’d lead them out of the wilderness.
At first light, I saw that our detachment had shrunk in every way you can imagine. Over half of those we’d started with had fallen out. The rest of us were shriveled up like we’d all aged thirty years. Our pants hung on bodies drying out into stalks of jerky. We all panted through open mouths ringed in white from dried sweat and puke. Swollen lips showed red where they’d cracked down to the meat.
We continued to shuffle into hell with the fires out.
It had become a rare occurrence for a horse to pee, but when the mount of one recruit so young his voice still cracked slowed to do just that the boy grabbed the empty canteen from around his neck and unstoppered it. The horse spread his back legs, stretched forward, tilting one hoof in like he was pigeon-toed, and loosed a stream of dark piss. The young recruit stuck his canteen under the horse, caught as much of the flow as he could, and drank. Though he had to stop and retch, he went back and finished what he’d caught. Soon, every time a horse stretched out his back legs, men were fighting each other to get their canteen under it.
I did what Wager would of done for his men and passed among them, warning, “Lot of salt in horse piss. It’ll dry you out and you’ll be worse off than before.” But thirst drove the men too hard for them to listen to reason and so many men went on drinking horse piss that Vikers had his boys hand out sugar to put in it. A couple of men tried to eat the sugar, but they didn’t even have the spit to dissolve that and it fell from their mouths as dry as it had gone in.
As soon as it was full light, a horrible realization struck us: whatever tracks we’d been following, they weren’t ours. We were lost. Still Drewbott ordered us on. After that, the sun got suddenly brighter and everything around me went shimmery. I trudged along believing one moment that I was chopping weeds in Old Mister’s tobacco fields. The next I saw Solomon’s wagon ahead of me, so real I could touch it. He turned in the driver’s seat, looked back, and waved for me to come up and sit with him. I’d be happy for a second or two then realize that my brain was shutting down and these visions were just a sign that I’d be dead soon.
I was jolted out of my stupor when the brown jerked on the reins I was leading him by and tried to break away. All along the line, the silent horses came to life nickering and lunging against the reins as they tried to break free.
“Water!” Lem shouted. “They smell water.”
“Mount up!” Vikers passed along Drewbott’s order. “Mount up and give the horses their heads!”
The thirst-maddened horses jerked free and charged toward the water they smelled. The unmounted men staggered after them. It took everything I had to keep the brown under control as we approached a shallow lake. The brown reared and snorted at the sight. The lake looked to have been made of pewter. A crusted rim of dried white powder ten feet wide ringed the water hole.
Alkali.
I yelled at the men on foot limping past, “Stop! The water’s bad! It’ll make y’all sick as dogs! Lem,” I screamed at my friend. “Lem! Stop!” But he was already splashing into the tainted water with the rest of the men and the horses, all guzzling as much as they could hold.
By nightfall everyone except me and Wager were doubled over heaving their guts up or writhing on the ground with their bellies cramped into hard knots. Lem lay beside me panting and moaning.
“We have to leave tonight,” I told him.
“I can’t,” he groaned. “I can’t move.”
“Have to,” I answered. “Stay here and you’ll die.”
“You got any guarantee we’ll find that spring? Or even that it’ll be running when we get there?”
“None,” I answered. “None at all.”
I stood and walked amidst the men whimpering and clutching at their bellies. The officers guarding Wager were stricken bad. Though they could barely lift their revolvers when I stepped in amongst them and cut away Wager’s bounds, I heard Meinzer cock his.
“We’re going for water,” I told him. “Who has the Sergeant’s sextant and spyglass?” Meinzer pointed to his saddlebags and I retrieved the instruments.
Wager helped Lem into the saddle then went about quietly gathering up a few empty canteens and promising his men he’d return with them full. At the edge of camp, we came upon Drewbott, squatted down, emptying his liquefied innards onto the desert. He went for his revolver, but was too weak to stay squatting and tipped over into his own mess.
“I remember the coordinates exactly,” I told him as we passed. “When the sun comes up, Sergeant Allbright will shoot them and we’ll ride straight for the spring.”
“Why,” Drewbott croaked out, “didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’re the enemy,” I answered. “And we are captives.”
The moon wasn’t up yet and we rode west into black emptiness.
Chapter 79
Wager, happy that we would not have to navigate by dead reckoning as he’d thought we would, shot the coordinates I gave him as soon as the sun rose and we rode and walked all the next day. Though Lem passed in and out of consciousness, he stayed in the saddle. We reached the spring as the moon was rising that night. Though considerably slowed, it still trickled clear and fresh from its granite bed inside the ravine.
Wager and I took turns drinking our fill and tending to Lem. Gradually, he came around enough to drink from the canteen we’d filled for him. But he didn’t come completely to his senses, just talked about “play pretties” with imaginary friends then passed out again.
Which is the condition he was in when Wager asked, “Has he made water?”
I shook my head.
“Keep an eye on him. Might mean his kidneys have failed. If that’s the case, we’re going to need to ride on. Take water back to the men without him.”
“Wager,” I asked. “You’re not serious about going back, are you?”
“Of course. Did you think that I’d abandon my men?”
“I’m not going back there.”
“We have to. Men will die if we don’t.”
“We’ll die if we do.”
“No. We might be court-martialed, but the truth will out.”
“Wager, we escaped,” I pleaded. “We’re free. We don’t have to go back.”
“Cathy, I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”
I didn’t answer, for all the noble ideas crowding his head would of blocked out my words.
“Cathy, they’re my men. A fair number of them signed on because of me.”
“I don’t care about them. I care about us. About the life we’re supposed to have together.”
“Would you want the man who could turn his back on the ones depend on him most?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I want that man alive any way I can have him.”
He stood with his hands on his hips and bit back the harsh words I knew he wanted to speak. Finally, walking away, he said in a flat voice, “I recall seeing a prickly pear patch down that way.”
The darkness swallowed him up, but I watched anyway. After a time, a rusty voice I barely recognized said, “That’s a good man.”
I helped Lem sit up. He gulped down several big swallows and I asked if he needed to pee.
He nodded and I helped him up ont
o his haunches, opened his fly, and fished out his pecker. His pee was thick and near as dark as coal oil. But he was sweating again and making sense.
Lem put his hand on mine and said, “I heard what you and the sergeant was saying. I see now that he is your all in all and you his. Bill, you been a good friend. Best friend a man could of ever had. I’m sorry I ever wished for more and let jealousy twist me up the way it did. Stupid of me to think a fine man like you would of ever choiced an old plow-pusher from Georgia.”
“Lem, no,” I said. “Don’t downrate yourself like that. Anyone would be proud to have you. I’d of been proud myself, but—”
“Don’t matter,” he said, his voice thick with hurt. “I hope you two’s happy together.”
“Lem, it’s not like that. I’d of been proud to have you, but I never could of. Not that way. Lem, I’m not a man.”
“You’re all the man I ever wanted,” Lem answered.
“Lem.” I unbuttoned my jacket and stretched the bindings apart until a raisin-dark nipple popped out into the moonlight.
“Oh,” Lem muttered and fell silent.
I closed my jacket.
“Have you always been…?” he asked.
“Female? Yep. Born female, enlisted female, served female.”
He considered my revelation for a much shorter time than I would of expected before smiling his beautiful, easy smile and saying, “So, Bill, you’re a girl. That makes sense. All my best friends always been girls.” He puzzled through all this a moment longer before asking, “And so, the sergeant? He’s not?” He wobbled his hand back and forth.
“No.”
Learning that Wager wasn’t a sodomite pleased Lem. “So he’d of never choiced me, either. All right, then.” He nodded, satisfied, until a final question furled his brow and he asked, “If you were born a baby girl, why’d they name you Bill?”
“There’s lots to explain, Lem, and we’ve got a long ride back to camp tomorrow to get it all done.” I had accepted that Wager was going back with water for his men because that is who he was and I was going with him because I couldn’t not go with him.