The man helped Bowman to get down from his horse and lay him on a blanket.
Bowman watched him light a fire that had already been prepared. There was a small reserve of wood there and, lifting his head, he saw that the vault of the cave was blackened by soot. When Bowman felt the heat reach him, he closed his eyes.
*
The smoke rose towards the crack in the vault. The rain had stopped, but the cave was still damp. The smell of the horses and the fire mixed with the humid stink of their soaked clothes. The man was not there. Bowman was leaning against his saddle. There was a new reserve of wood beside the hearth. He sat up and the pain ran down his spine like venom in a vein. He drank earth-tasting water from a flask that lay nearby, then poured some on his hand and rinsed the saliva-encrusted corners of his mouth. The two horses were sleeping, one leaning on the other, their heads touching the ceiling of the cave.
The man had put fresh bandages on him. Bowman slid a hand behind his back, feeling for the wound. Eight inches beneath his shoulder blade. The bullet had not gone through him; it had ricocheted off his ribs. The cracked ribs took his breath away whenever he moved. He tossed two branches on the fire and leaned back slowly against the saddle again. He would have liked to drink some of Brewster’s potion to soothe the pain, but he preferred to wait until the man returned. He made do with the bottle of whiskey.
When he heard footsteps, Bowman put the Henry across his legs.
“Who’s there?”
“Calm down, Englishman. It’s me.”
He came back with flasks filled with water hanging from his shoulder and, in his hand, holding them by their tails, a big rodent and an iguana.
“For us, but we can’t stay here too long. The horses haven’t eaten anything for two days.”
“There’s some oats in my saddlebags. Two days?”
“I already gave them the oats. You slept nearly twenty-four hours, Englishman. I’ll take the horses out later. I’ll go look for some bushes.”
Bowman put his rifle down.
“My name’s Bowman. Arthur Bowman.”
The man removed his hat. His hair was black and straight.
“John Doe.”
“In England, that’s the name given to unknown people during a trial.”
John Doe looked at him, curious.
“I didn’t know that came from you. Here, it’s the name we give to unidentified corpses.”
John Doe leaned on an elbow and sat up.
“It’s not your real name?”
“It’s the name I chose. My white name.”
“Mixed blood?”
John Doe smiled at Bowman.
“The Mandans have pale skin and eyes. There’s a German who came to our land a long time ago, to study us. He said we were the descendants of a Welsh prince who came here with the Spanish. We are not only Indians, we are also bastards.”
He gave a little nervous laugh, took a knife from his belt and began butchering the creatures he had brought with him.
“Why do you have a white name?”
“I was raised by Protestants who thought it was a good idea to adopt a little Indian orphan. But I didn’t keep the name they gave me.”
Bowman looked around the cave and asked what this place was.
“A hideout where I come sometimes.”
“Do many people know about it?”
“Only Indians.”
The Mandan had gutted the two animals. He threw their intestines on the embers.
“John Doe is my criminal name.”
“Criminal?”
“I’m a thief. But the Indians are not even allowed to be outlaws like anyone else. We are renegades, those who are not even part of the white world.”
He smiled again.
“I want to be treated like a real criminal, so I chose this name. And you, you have an Indian name. ‘The Man of the Bow’. Where did you get your scars, Bowman?”
Bowman tensed up, realising that John Doe had undressed him while he slept. He looked at the Mandan’s hands, with his two severed fingers.
“In some of the countries I’ve been, they cut off thieves’ fingers. Is that what happened to you?”
John Doe put the meat to grill over the fire and stopped for a moment, to look at his hands.
“When I left the white people, I went back to my tribe’s land. I wanted to have my true Indian name too.”
“And they cut your fingers off?”
He turned towards Bowman.
“I did it myself. It’s the Okipa.”
“The Okipa?”
“The rite of passage. To take your name and your place in the tribe, to become a warrior.”
Bowman shivered.
“You cut your fingers off to have a name?”
“The fingers, that’s only at the end.”
“The end?”
“No white man must know – it’s a secret ceremony. But you, too, have done the Okipa, Bowman, so I can tell you. Afterward, you must tell me what you did.”
“I didn’t cut my own fingers off.”
Bowman lowered his head and gripped the bottle of whiskey tight in his hand. John Doe had smiled at him like Alexandra Desmond. With an intimacy that he did not yet understand. The Indian spoke slowly.
“First, you sit outside in the middle of the village and you fast for four days and four nights. When the fasting is over, you go into the big hut with the other men and they whip you until your skin is torn to pieces. When they’re done, they drive stakes under the muscles of your shoulders. They tie ropes to them and hang you from the ceiling of the hut. They attach bisons’ heads to your feet and then they use poles to swing you from side to side and spin you round.”
The Indian smiled at Bowman.
“During all this time, you must not stop smiling.”
Bowman almost spat out his mouthful of alcohol. The Mandan watched the flames and the smile disappeared from his face.
“When you faint, the elders untie you and wait to see if the spirits bring you back to life. If you wake up, you must leave the hut and run five times around the village. When you have finished running, you cut your two little fingers off with a hatchet and then you are welcomed into the tribe like a Mandan worthy of remembrance.”
He turned back to Bowman. His smile had reappeared.
“Four Bears, the greatest chief of all the Mandans, did the Okipa twice in a row. I managed it only once and I was lucky, because smallpox killed nearly all of my people. There are only about thirty Mandans left in the whole country. So the village was small and it was easy to run around it.”
Bowman rolled onto his side, got on all fours and lifted himself up by gripping the wall of the cave. He staggered over to a dark corner and leaned forward, trying to vomit. All he threw up were a few mouthfuls of bile mixed with whiskey. Bent double, he waited to get his breath back.
“You did the same thing, Bowman. Why does it scare you like that?”
Bowman wiped his mouth. He was breathing hard and each inhalation made his broken ribs ache.
“I didn’t do the same thing. I didn’t want this to happen. You’d have to be mad to choose to do something like that.”
“Mad?”
Bowman went back near the fire, trembling from head to foot.
“I’ve never heard anything so sick in my life. You can’t choose that.”
He collapsed onto the blanket. The Mandan stood up, shook out his own blanket and draped it around the Englishman’s shoulders.
“Do you think I chose to see my family and my tribe die of smallpox, poisoned by the blankets of the fur traders who wanted our land? The Okipa is a ceremony of life, Bowman. The strength I needed to bear the pain, I keep that with me. You did it too, and the spirits kept you alive.”
“It was torture. And so was what you did.”
The Indian sat near the fire to cut the rodent and the lizard into small pieces.
“The spirits brought me back to earth, and it is on earth that I walk no
w. When you turn in the air, hanging from the ceiling of the hut, the only thing you think about is going back down to earth and living there. Afterward, you know where the spirits are, where you are and what your place is, among the living. The memory of suffering remains only in the body; the spirit is free. You, Bowman, you remained suspended in your pain and you are still seeking the earth.”
“You don’t know me. And I didn’t choose it. They did it to me.”
John Doe looked at him with an amused expression.
“What good does it do to continue feeling anger towards them? You cannot be the victim of your own life, Bowman. That is the Okipa too: understanding that you cannot choose.”
Bowman pulled the blanket tight around him, watching as the white Indian slowly chewed his meat.
“What’s your real name?”
“Inyan Sapa. In your language, that means ‘Little Black’. The whites will never find me, because I’m an Indian hidden inside the skin of one of their own.”
He was still smiling, but Bowman didn’t feel he could trust that smile, given that the Indian had learned it while being hung from the ceiling of a hut.
“Why did you help me, if you hate the whites?”
“That is a question to which I have, as yet, no answer. Maybe because you wanted to save those Comanches, but I’m not sure about that. Sometimes it’s John Doe who chooses. Sometimes it’s Little Black. They do not have the same reasons. The white and the Indian do not see things in the same way, but occasionally they agree to do something together.”
John Doe gave Bowman some food.
“The Comanches didn’t want to follow you?”
Bowman swallowed some of the juice from the meat and shook his head. The Indian stood up and his voice rose inside the cave: “I am not like them. The whites kill us because we are Indians. I will not die because I am one of them. They want to force us to change, so I hid the Indian deep inside me. They won’t find him. The whites invented America as a country without a past so they could have a new life. But this land has a memory. That is why they kill us, to erase that memory. What do you think about this?”
“What do I think? That it’s the same bullshit everywhere I’ve been.”
The Indian slowly inhaled.
“The Okipa is the meeting of the two men that are inside us. The warrior and the man who walks the earth in peace. You have to live with both of them, Bowman.”
Bowman smiled in turn.
“Which one of them revolted, John Doe or Little Black?”
The Indian turned towards him.
“Revolted? The smallpox killed us. There are only a handful of us left. What do you want me to revolt against? I steal because I want money, like the whites.”
Bowman stopped smiling.
“My tribe is even smaller than yours. There were ten of us after the Okipa, if that’s what you want to call it. Three are already dead and two have come over here. The ones who killed on the track. The Comanches were hanged because of what those men did.”
“I heard about murders committed by your brothers. I understand now. They are like you, suspended in the air.”
“My brothers?”
“How do you want to call them?”
Bowman did not reply. The Mandan sat back down.
“I have to sleep now. Rest, Bowman. Tomorrow, we must leave.”
“The man in Bent’s Fort . . . Did you kill him?”
“No, but I shot at him and some people were injured in the fire you started. They are searching for us.”
John Doe fell asleep a few minutes later and his body began to tremble, shaken by nervous spasms.
*
The light burned his eyes for a long time before he was able to recognise the landscape. It was still the same: little rocky mountains. The horses, weakened, struggled beneath their weight. It took them three hours to reach the last mountain pass, which opened onto a dry plain with the green line of the river in the distance. Before leaving the shelter of the mountains, John Doe stared out far ahead, sniffing the air for several minutes.
“Fort Lyon is only forty miles from here, but we have to take the horses to the river. We’ll be there by nightfall. We can’t stay long.”
The sky was cloudless, the moon large and the stars pale. The sound of the river became increasingly loud and soon the silhouettes of trees grew visible before them.
They tethered the horses, leaving them enough rope to graze all they wanted, and the two men walked to the riverbank, rifles in hand. Bowman washed his face and drank, while the Indian remained standing. He did not touch the water. When Bowman saw this, he stopped moving and looked around him.
“What’s the matter?”
John Doe, or Little Black, did not reply straight away. Strangely, the moonlight, which whitened his skin, also seemed to bring out his Indian features.
“This place. Something isn’t right here.”
Bowman continued scanning the darkness beyond the bright current of the river.
“It’s just a river in the middle of a plain.”
“You don’t like rivers?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Your voice.”
Bowman moved away from the water. He was moving more easily. The wound was beginning to scar. Only his broken ribs hurt him now. He sat in the grass and watched the Indian, who was still immobile.
“Where are we?”
“Sand Creek River. A hundred miles north of Bent’s Fort. You have to decide where you want to go, Bowman.”
“The men from the Bent and St Vrain, they don’t know who was with me. You can go now. I’ll be all right.”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet?”
“We must travel further.”
“I don’t know where I’m going. You already rescued me, and you don’t owe me anything.”
John Doe turned towards him.
“The two brothers you’re looking for . . . Are they different from other men?”
“What?”
“Are they different?”
Bowman looked out at the black river, flecked with moonlight.
“Maybe not that different. Or only because of what happened to them. Before, we weren’t the same.”
John Doe smiled and Bowman caught the gleam of his white teeth in the darkness, like the reflections on the surface of the Sand Creek River.
“If your brothers are not different from other men, then we know where to go.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If the whites were here for anything else, they would have come to see us and they would have listened to us.”
Bowman slowly got to his feet.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Indian.”
Little Black smiled again and this time his eyes shone in the moonlight.
“Gold, Bowman. Gold.”
At daybreak, they entered a desert.
John Doe found his way like an animal, following an itinerary engraved in a memory older than his own, without any landmarks that Bowman could see. When Bowman began to feel thirsty and worry because he could see nothing but rocks all the way to the horizon, John would stop at the foot of a rock where there was a trickle of water. Anyone else would have died there without knowing that salvation was at hand. For the horses, they always managed to find a little nook where bushes grew. The animals devoured them, even though they were as dry as rocks. There was something erratic but necessary about the course they took, following incomprehensible detours that led them, at evening, to a little spring that burst through a crack, vanishing three feet further on under the rocks. Sometimes it took them two hours to fill the flasks from a miraculous trickle of water on the surface of a stone. But there was water, food, and wood to cook snakes and lizards. John dug holes at the foot of dead bushes, cutting off bits of roots to chew. They had a sour taste, but they created saliva in the mouth and staved off hunger. Every evening, the Indian changed Bowman’s bandages. He took some herbs from his
saddlebags, crushed them, mixed them with ash from the fire, and rubbed them into the wound. John Doe and Little Black continued to coexist in the Mandan’s head. Without warning, he would switch from English to a strange language that sounded like that spoken by negroes living in contact with the British. A well-bred Christian, a thief or a nostalgic Indian? Bowman could not tell who was the real John Doe. But whoever he was, he knew the right way and found them food.
Always heading southward, they safely navigated a vast labyrinth whose invisible walls were death in every form offered by this desert: thirst, hunger, exhaustion, pursuit, ambushes. They travelled three times the distance that separated them from the track between Pueblo and Denver, but it was the only way they could get there. On the last night, they slept very close to the track. They did not light a fire and left the horses saddled.
“Here, where there’s no-one, we must hide. But when we get to Pikes Peak, surrounded by other people, we won’t have to anymore. Sleep now. I will wake you.”
“John?”
“What?”
“What do you do with madmen, in the tribe?”
“Those who walk on another earth live among us.”
“And my brothers?”
“Sleep. Tiredness is home to deceptive spirits.”
“I don’t think I will sleep.”
“See you later.”
John Doe rolled up in his blanket and a few moments later his body was shaken by spasms again. Bowman lay down without closing his eyes. Three hours later, he was startled when Little Black shook his shoulder.
“The moon is with us. It is the moment to cross the white man’s track.”
The right moment, when everyone was asleep, even Sergeant Bowman. Annoyed, he got to his feet and rolled up his blanket. The Indian had tied cloths around the horses’ hooves and, under a line of clouds blacker than the night, they walked the path under the Devil’s nose. They moved slowly for a few miles and then stopped to remove the cloths that had served to muffle the sound of horseshoes.
“The horses want to gallop to the forest. How is your wound, Bowman?”
Retribution Road Page 36