Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  Fort Morgan was a lot like the endless Confederate encampments I had endured while serving. The only difference was that the fort didn’t relocate in the morning; it had far fewer men moaning and dying in tents; and it was less prone to abandonment at night. I reckon Colorado was a long way for a man to run home from. Most soldiers out there had already done their running, and Fort Morgan was where they’d ended up. Their final resting spot was a scrabble of tents and rickety shacks ringed by a shoddy wall of pine stumps where the best that could be said was they fed you twice a day. Two muddy tracks came in straight as an arrow from the east, cut right through Fort Morgan, and disappeared out the other end toward the west. In one direction, a flat nothing where only the dust stirred and a creek petered out and was swallowed by the cracked earth; in the other, ancient and impossibly tall mountains stood with white tops like old men. The hell in-between was our home.

  In the spring and all through the summer—when the gray brows on those granite men to the west receded with the melts and the creek raged—an endless caravan of poor people with rich dreams appeared along the twin-rutted road from territories east. They passed through on their way to California, and our sworn duty at Fort Morgan was to see that their scalps moved right along with them.

  Those were the melts and the busy months—spring and summer. Autumn and winter were a harder time at the fort. Men took to cards and more drink than the Good Army allowed, and each of us spent our share of nights in the pen sobering up and feeling like asses for mistakes we barely remembered. Those were the hard months—and in the eighteen hundred and sixty-eighth year of our Lord, they got suddenly harder.

  * * *

  I was out with Private Collins taking in a pair of deer when Lieutenant Randall took the sickness. The Lieutenant had been away from the fort for near on eight weeks. A trail scout, he spent most of his time up in the hills living in a tent like a native and looking for less damnable passages between those brutish mountains. He was always a bit peculiar, but nothing to presage him wandering back into camp and murdering five good men in cold blood. Yet that’s just what he did; four of his fellow enlisted men were shot dead, plus a half-Indian cook named Sammy. Randall shot each of them in the head before someone managed to wing him and put an end to the slaughter. Why they didn’t kill him on the spot, I’ll never know.

  Private Collins and me returned from our hunt too late to help with anything but the digging. Saw the aftermath, though: brains and skull and hair that took me right back to the war. They was already mopping it up, and so we were handed shovels. Now, nobody consulted me for my legal expertise, but Justice would’ve been served by shooting Lieutenant Randall right there on the spot. But the good Army of the United States of America has its own sense of justice. There are trials and spectacles afforded a man before his chest is riddled by a firing squad. There are nights spent in the pen. Which is how I found myself nursing a blister from the shoveling, sitting there on a hard bench outside the holding cell, taking my shift at watching Lieutenant Randall so that he weren’t shot dead by some enterprising fellow before dawn.

  On the bench across from me was my hunting partner and shovel mate, Private Collins. I surmised that his presence was to make sure I didn’t scratch that itch of justice, either. I was keeping an eye on him and he on me, and both of us on the Lieutenant. Randall, meanwhile, snored and babbled like only the guilty and outright crazy could manage on the eve of their probable execution. What could make a man break camp one morning and ride in to shoot his comrades in their skulls? Morbid curiosity had me itching to know. I tried to discern some of what he was saying in his sleep—but couldn’t make out a word.

  “That’s Red talk,” Collins told me.

  I turned to the Private and realized I’d been leaning forward on my bench, my face scrunched up in concentration. I tried to relax. “You understand what he’s mumbling?” I asked, keeping my voice down.

  Collins chewed on the end of an unlit cheroot, and then spat a dab of tobacco between our feet. “Arapaho,” he said, matter-of-factly. Private Collins had that air about him, that supreme confidence that got on some men’s nerves. He had also bagged both deer that morning, firing before I had the chance. Still, I liked him.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked. The only Indian I recognized was their war cries, when the hair on the back of my neck was translation enough.

  Collins shrugged and sucked on his cigar. “Used to take an Arapaho whore in Mason,” he said. “I know what their language sounds like, can catch a few words, but unless he starts talking about how thick my member is…” He smiled. And not for the first time, I wondered why I liked this man yet despised so many others.

  “Why the hell is he dreaming in Arapaho?” I asked, still whispering. It was strange that I wanted the man in that pen dead but cared not to disturb his sleep. Collins turned toward the dimly lit cell.

  “Reckon he done and gone native. Happens. Too much time up in the hills. Or maybe he’s been heading into Mason and taking up with my whore.” Collins laughed, but Randall didn’t stir.

  I settled back on my bench and marveled at a man who could sleep through what might be the last night of his life. More than justice, I was thirsty for answers. I decided, come morning, I would ask the Major if Collins and I could go hunting for something up in those hills besides deer.

  * * *

  Major Jack Lawson was a peculiar leader of men. Part eccentric and part mountain man, he was the reason Fort Morgan had a grand piano and a small library but no decent latrine. Music and books—and somehow shitting in bare holes in the dirt—were all apparently good for our souls.

  Turned out the Major was just as curious about Randall’s sudden madness as we were. He gave us his blessing to ride out in search of clues.

  Collins knew where Randall had set up camp the previous autumn, and so we followed an angry stream up through the pines and aspens and cottonwoods that made up the scruff around the old mountain’s neck. Stumbling on a native camp, it took a moment to realize that it was in fact Randall’s place. An army-issue tent lay draped across a lean-to of woven branches. A half-finished structure of limbs and sticks jutted up nearby, a rough circle with a tall pole in the center. Around the camp, every tree within a hundred feet had been felled, the trunks radiating outward as though they’d been knocked over by a terrible blast. Gnawed stumps stood out everywhere. I noticed how cleanly they’d been hewn, not an errant strike to be seen, none of the work of a madman.

  “Took down enough trees for a second Morgan up here,” I remarked. I peered inside Randall’s abandoned tent and found nothing amiss. The bedroll was laid out like it expected to be slept in, a set of pots and cutlery innocently nestled in one corner. It smelled of leather and sweat and man, even with the air cold enough to fog my breath. Collins poked a smoldering log in the fire pit with a stick and was rewarded with a flight of embers, like bees startling from a hive.

  “Don’t think he was after the timber,” Collins said. He left the pit alone and headed past the tent to the half-completed structure that’d made me think this was an Indian campsite. Shielding his eyes, he glanced up at the autumn sky. “I reckon he was out to fell the shade, is what.”

  I looked up as well. The morning sun slid shyly behind a bank of clouds. “‘Fell the shade?’” I asked.

  “It’s a sun hut.” Collins waved his arm. “They dance in it. The Arapaho do.”

  There was a loud snap in the woods. We both turned toward the sound. There was a flash of white as a deer bounded away from us and through the cottonwoods. I turned to Collins, who I suspected knew more of the Arapaho than the moans of a Mason whore.

  “What kind of dance?”

  Collins watched the deer a moment longer, then scanned the woods. Finally, he turned to the odd structure, whose walls curved upward like an unfinished dome. A pole sat in the center that I figured was bound to support an arching roof; but I would find out later that the hut was finished just as it stood.

  “All
I know is what little I’ve heard. Pretty sure it started with the Arapaho, but other tribes have taken part. Spreading like those damn Mormons, like some kinda religion.” Collins pointed to the sky. “They dance around a pole and stare up at the sun for days. They see things. Hear voices. And then they probably get drunk on peyote and shove feathers up their arses for all I know.”

  He shrugged and pulled out his cheroot. To my amazement, Collins bent and grabbed a smoking fag from the fire and lit the thing with noisy puffs. Maybe he figured we’d already chased away the deer and to hell with the smoke. Or maybe he’d seen enough death the day before to stop saving the thing for a morrow. Or perhaps the talk of ghosts and whispers had stirred his nerves. I watched his white exhalations rise toward the clouds, and the sun reemerged to peer down at us.

  “I guess you were right,” I told Collins.

  He raised an eyebrow and threw the fag back in the fire.

  “I think Lieutenant Randall has done and gone native. Maybe fell for some squaw and started seeing us as the enemy.”

  The private pinched something off the end of his tongue and inspected it. “Maybe,” he said. But it sounded like he doubted it. He smoked his cheroot like it would be his last and studied the sky as if the sun up there knew something we didn’t.

  * * *

  The two of us shared our findings with the Major later that morning and handed over Randall’s tent, bedroll, and mess kit. Collins drew a straw for the firing squad; I didn’t. The both of us had missed the court martial, which hadn’t taken long. Three witnesses said he did it, and Randall hadn’t uttered a word of defense. We heard he stared at the ceiling the entire time before being led back to the pen.

  I should have gotten some sleep before lunch—only had a few hours the night before—but I volunteered to ride out with some others to see about another rustling, a strange disappearance of cattle from a rancher to the east.

  On the ride out, I sidled my horse next to John McCall’s. McCall had grown up in the Arizona territory, had missed the war entirely, and knew as much about Indians as any of us. He used to keep a feather stuck in his cap until the major told him to lose it. When pressed, McCall admitted he’d heard of the Sun Dance. He was surprised to hear about the hut near Randall’s tent, said he thought it must’ve already been there. I told him about the felled trees. McCall didn’t have much to say after that. We rode along in silence, the sun beating down on us, the horses growing warm, the featureless landscape making it feel like we hardly moved.

  While the others went to talk to the rancher about his missing cattle and the burn marks some lightning strikes had left in the grass, I rode the fence line looking for a break in the thorny wire. I was sure the rancher had already checked his fence, but in my experience the most likely culprit to make off with a few head of cattle were those few head of cattle. I expected to see them milling about on the side of the trail where the grass grew tallest. It was getting on noon, and the flies buzzed something fierce. Amazing it could be cool in the morning up in the hills and so damn hot come afternoon on the plains. My mouth was dry and tasted of the dirt kicked up by my horse. Shaking my canteen, I decided to take it easy on the water. Before long, I found a drooping wire in the fence and dismounted to take a closer look.

  Was only the top wire amiss. A sprightly cow might make the jump, but unlikely. Wiping my neck, I glanced up accusingly at the high sun. Not a cloud in the sky. I remembered something I’d learned early on in Kansas: there were tribes who would only come at you in the morning from the east. They would ride in, and you couldn’t see their arrows in the glare. Before they attacked, one of their scouts would sit on a hill every morning, high on his horse, feathers blazing, and would be as good as invisible. Ghosts, bringing hell from the east. They would keep an eye on their enemy until it was time to rain death. Devious sons a’bitches.

  The sun shone bright that day as I scanned the sky—and finally I had to look away. I didn’t believe what Collins and McCall had said about dancing around and looking up at that fiery beast. A man couldn’t stand two seconds staring at it. And maybe I was delirious from lack of sleep; or thinking about a man I had known who was at that moment being shot in the chest by my compadres; or maybe it was the sight of those I’d buried the day before; or I was just being powerfully curious and not thinking straight. But I felt an ungodly tug… and so I looked up and tried to return the gaze of that great yellow monster in the wide blue sky.

  The burn was intense and immediate. It made my brain hurt somewhere deep between my brows. The squinting was involuntary. My horse made a sound and pawed at the air with one hoof. “Steady, now,” I told him, taking the reins and turning away, unable to take it any longer. Blinking tears, I could see a green image in my vision, a disk the color of fresh grass. I wondered if this was what they claimed to see, those who danced and saw what weren’t there.

  The wire fence drooped like it was melting in the sun. A faint wind blew dust across my boots. Back toward the fort, mountains rose from the flat desert, impossibly tall, the white on their tops growing with the cold months. I blinked and blinked and wondered what in the hell I was doing out there. How could anyone dance around for three days and stare at the sun? Determined, I gave it another try. I would go for the count of twenty, pain be damned. If an Arapaho could do it, so could I.

  Throwing my head back, I squinted at the sun and met it like a man. Again, the feeling was like claws raking my eyeballs. There was a primitive urge to look away, like a thumb on a hot pan. I forced my eyes open wider, muscles in my face quivering in complaint, tears streaking down my cheeks. I lost count. I swayed, my balance funny, and reached for a fencepost to steady myself. As my horse clomped down the road, I ignored him. There was nothing but white and heat, both penetrating straight into my brain. I hopped in place and cursed nothing in particular, just said “shit” and “damn” while the tears streamed out, but no bright light was stronger than this Virginia boy.

  I had to’ve gone to a count of twenty, but I decided to keep going a bit more. I had the water in the canteen, could dump that in my eyes after and put the fire out. There was no thought of going blind. That fear would come later. I was just enduring the pain because goddamnit it wasn’t going to beat me.

  My neck cramped up, but now something had taken hold of me, some wild thought that this was the right thing to do, to stare at the sun for as long as I was able. Releasing the post, I drifted around in circles there in the dirt, admiring the shapes and colors as they spun in my vision. I saw purple. I saw strangers swim through the sky. When my lids clamped down involuntarily, I used my fingers to pry them open again. The burn and pain went straight through me until it felt like an itch being scratched. I spun and spun and felt the barbed wire catch at my trousers. The fence would keep me in. I thought of Collins spinning around in his little Indian hut. The barbs were suddenly those sticks, poking at me, corralling me. The light shone right through my eyes, down to the base of my skull, and deep into my neck where words are formed. My face grew warm, but now the bright light was cool as it swam through me. I could hear myself laugh. The horse drew away further, and I cared little.

  When the vision came, it was a thunderclap. A sudden roar, though I realized the words had been there before. They were the buzzing in my brain, nonsense words, but I knew what they meant. I saw them like shapes and things, like swirling dreams. There was shouting, someone on the road with me, a man with my own voice. Crying and crying, fingers pinned my eyes open, and I never wanted to look away from the sun again. I loved it in that instant. I wanted it to fall out of the sky and enter me through my eyeballs; I wanted to let it blow me across the prairie and set everything on fire, to burn that land ahead of its coming, to make room. I saw men and women and children fall before me. I saw an infant thrown into the flames, blood in everyone’s eyes. And the voices, these words foreign and understood that came like pictures directly into my head, this voice on the road that spoke as I spun and spun between the barbed wire
and my skittish horse, they sounded like the tongue of a Red Man.

  * * *

  I woke up and men were dead. My men. Something told me there had been a killing. My head throbbed like my heart was trapped in my skull, had swollen up, and needed out. It took a moment to realize my eyes were open but I wasn’t seeing anything. I could barely make out a shape in front of my face when I waved my hand before it. Groping about, I felt a bunk beneath me, a wall of steel bars behind. I was in the pen. I could feel the firing squad lined up, instruments of death aimed at my chest, could see the men I’d killed.

  “Sir, he’s done stirred.”

  Voices and shuffling feet. I had Arapaho on my tongue, the taste of silver and fire, words like pictures drawn in the dirt, telling me what to do. Something alien had communicated with me. A part of it lived deep inside.

  “Drink some water, son.”

  There was a hand on my wrist, a hand reaching through the bars. A tin of water was pressed into my palm, sloshing cool on my forearm. My lips stung as I drank. I pulled the cup away and touched my mouth, found my lips swollen and cracked. My throat burned. But the horrible throbbing in my eyes and my brain drowned out these lesser hurts.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Major?” My voice was a pale shadow of its old self. I drank more, ignoring the sting of my fouled lips. “What did I do?” I asked.

  “They found you face up in the dirt, babbling like you had a few too many. Your horse came back to the fort without you.”

  “I can’t see.”

  “That’s what you’ve been sayin’. Doc said to put you in here where it was dark, that it should come back. You rest up, okay? Can’t afford to lose any more of my men.”

  “How many?”

  I could hear the boards creak as the Major shifted his weight. “How many of what, son?”

  “Did I… how many dead?” Memories and visions were mixed up in my head. Words I knew and words I didn’t. There were flashes of green and swimming lights in my eyes like an angry campfire. Something was telling me to kill or that I already had, hard to tell which.