Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

  “There ain’t no albinos,” his brother would say of the horses.

  “That’s what I thought,” he would say, and his brother would think about what he said and after a while he would speak again and he’d say, “Extra Billy was kilt twice,” as if it should not be overlooked or forgotten.

  “The old man?” he asked again.

  “I tell you there weren’t no old man.”

  He would remember waking up in the Sibley tent, his bloody feet soaking in a basin of water. The light of a huge half-moon was crossing the pellucid darkness and graying the inside of the tent were the shadows of the passing men against its walls. There was an orderly breaking ice with a hatchet, crushing it and filling ice bags with screw tops. He was surrounded by them. He felt a hot flush run through him and then shivered from their cold. Beneath his cot were more cooling blocks of ice giving up their cold and melting into the thirsty earth. There was a watermelon in a washtub, a porcelain water pitcher and basin.

  “What in hell?” he said, and the orderly looked up at him with wide anxious eyes. He tried to sit up but couldn’t. He felt as if something was shattered inside him. He felt hot and cold and experienced a fit of hard-shaking chills followed by nausea.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded to know.

  “I was tol’ to keep you cooled down and the flies off’n you.”

  “Find me some spurs,” he said. “Saddle my horse.” But he began to shiver again and could not stop himself and his teeth were chattering.

  Outside the wall of the tent he could hear them talking.

  It was said he ought to be dead is what he ought to be.

  “How many was killed?” another voice said.

  “All of them,” the first voice said.

  “It’s a miracle he ain’t dead.”

  “Yes. It’s a fucking miracle.”

  He could smell the cigarettes they smoked and wished for one. Then he slept again. For how long he did not know. His body stank with sweat and burned dead skin. At least he knew he was not now dead.

  18

  THAT FIRST NIGHT sleep was difficult and spent in vague, deep, and inaccessible dreams. He knew he was at the depth of his physical decline and on the verge of his recovery. He began to shiver from the sun’s poisoning and could not stop himself. Soon his whole body was quivering and his teeth clacking and he cried out for how painful the shuddering movement that racked his body. He felt himself to be coming apart with the force that struck his joints and could not help but cried out in agony.

  His brother called to him, saying his name and he wondered where he’d heard the name before and then he recognized it as his own.

  His brother left his cot and lay down on top of him, covering his body with his own as if to keep him from flying apart. He worked his arms around him and squeezed and held him, his face in his neck until the jarring shakes relented and he could collect himself. They came on again and swept through him with a ferocity that left him panting and helpless.

  The repetition of the ordeal exhausted him and he had all he could do to smoke the cigarette his brother shaped for him. The strong black tobacco dizzied him and gave him some peace, but he could not help himself and he moaned with the slightest movement, with each return of the judders, and he knew his body would cry with ache in the morning.

  From outside the tent came a light and the murmur of voices. A Coleman lamp had been lit and turned down low and two old troopers were smoking and drinking and remembering their horses. He fell to sleep again and passed into a second sleep and this one took him into the dead of night and through to morning. When he woke it was to the familiar hum and din of the army. He remembered waking in the desert and the yellow silk that bound Teddy’s black hair. He remembered being lifted into the wagon, being held in the night in his brother’s arms.

  Teddy sat on a stool at the tent opening. The way his shoulders and arms moved he was working horsehair. He was content to lie still and watch Teddy’s back, the weaving movements of his shoulders and elbows. When they brought fresh blocks of ice, Teddy picked up his stool and stepped aside with his flow of strands that they might haul in fresh blocks to place under his cot. He closed his eyes that they should think him asleep.

  But Teddy wasn’t fooled and sent for his brother and when he came he brought a cup of sweet sugary coffee, a waxed paper full of hot biscuits, and a basket of eggs. He unfolded the canvas chair and sat down beside the cot. He took out his tobacco and rolled him a smoke and after lighting it, placed it between Napoleon’s lips.

  His brother said nothing and in his presence there was no curiosity. There were no anxious questions as to the battle, the killed and missing men, or the days he experienced in the desert.

  Napoleon held up a hand, a preface to saying something, and then he let his hand back down—the best he could do.

  His brother leaned over and took his chin in the perch of his hand and studied his thinned and haggard face. Both Napoleon’s eyes were blackened and his lips were split, crusted and swollen. His cheeks were raw and yellowed with blisters.

  “I see you got scratched up pretty good,” his brother said, but the only sign of concern he could read in his brother’s face was the constant tonguing of a toothpick he chewed when he was not smoking a cigarette.

  “You okay?” his brother asked, cocking his head to one side. “You ain’t cuckoo?”

  “Do I look okay?”

  “No. You look like death warmed over,” he said, letting go of his chin and sitting back in the canvas chair.

  “I feel like it,” he said.

  “You made it,” his brother said. “You get to do everything one more time.”

  “It’s a regrettable thing.”

  “They were brave horses,” his brother said.

  “Bandy and Extra Billy,” he said. “It is my shame to have lost those men.”

  The affair had been worse than tragic; it had been stupid. He needed to ease his heart. He could not help himself in this moment.

  “I see your meaning well enough,” Xenophon said, but still, he himself regretted more the loss of the mounts.

  “I want to be dressed,” he said, and heard his voice break like a child’s.

  After his brother helped him stand from the cot he held erect for some seconds and then with a groan he collapsed to the floor, upsetting the cot and the canvas chair, the coffee and biscuits. His collapse was so complete his brother could not catch him in his falling and he felt his cheek split open.

  His brother kneeled down and righted the cot and lifted him to his feet that he could lie back down.

  “Got any more bright ideas?”

  “No.”

  Xenophon bandaged his bleeding cheek and washed him and put liniment on him to soothe his leg and arm joints.

  “Bad things happen in this world,” his brother said.

  “Do you believe it will be any better in the next?”

  “What next?”

  Xenophon worked hard trying to make the pain come out of Napoleon as if his body was just another body to be worked on, like the body of a horse, but it was a stubborn pain he worked and not wholly of the body. If the pain was inside the mind it could be seen through the depths of the eyes, just like a horse. No one knew when or how the pain could get there, but a pain that found its way into the mind was to be feared the most because pain in the body was treatable and could be worked out of a man or a horse. But when the pain found its way into the man’s mind, or the horse’s mind, it was impossible to tell.

  He lifted his head to watch his brother’s attempt to relieve his body, to restore some peace to his aching bones and muscles and skin.

  “They were not Villa’s,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “There were Yaquis with them.”

  “Then who were they?”

  “I believe they were their own army themselves.”

  His brother was running his hands over him, finding the pain’s hot joints and each
time he did he made fists and sank them deeply into his burned flesh. Why he was doing this he did not know. The pain had no location and his skin was agony when touched. His face stiffened under his brother’s heavy hands and more than once he moaned and had to catch his breath.

  His brother paused and sat back and when he returned to his work his touch was lightened.

  “That feels good,” he said.

  “No, it don’t,” his brother said.

  From the basket his brother took an egg. He broke the egg and dishing the yolk from one shell to the next he let the raw albumen pour from the shells onto his burned skin where it smoothed and gelled.

  “Try and sleep some more,” his brother said.

  “I have nightmares.”

  “What kind of nightmares?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Is it the kind of thing you want to remember?”

  “No,” he said. “Probably not.”

  “You’ll take it to bed with you for a while,” his brother said.

  One after another he cracked the eggs and held the yolks inside their shells and let the cool albumen slide onto his skin and then he covered him with a thin clean sheet.

  “Did you ever think of getting married?” Napoleon said.

  “Did I ever say I did?”

  “No.”

  “You marry a wife you have married trouble.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  That day and night there was a turmoil in his mind. He’d seen worse, he just couldn’t remember when. But this time there was a sureness taken from him, a carelessness and a sureness when it came to his being. He could not explain it. He was still an able and confident man, but something had slipped away from him and left behind was an emptiness he could feel inside himself. He was entering into a new and strange life. Was it brought on by the unfortunate events in the desert, or was it waiting for him all this time and an experience and condition inevitable?

  When he awoke, inside the tent was sably darkness. At first he was unsure of his surroundings, but then he recalled where he was. He remembered Extra Billy lifting a bloody fist to his smiling lips and tipping his fist as if a whisky glass. He shooed the thought away and another, shot through the jaw and his mouth a mixture of teeth and bone and flesh, the face skin blown open and the working muscles revealed.

  On a plate beside his cot was a hamburger sandwich and there was a pitcher of water. His cheek felt tight and knotted. When he touched it he could feel coarse horsehair stitches where he’d broke it open. His brother or Teddy, both of them horse doctors, applying their needle and rough technique to his cut face while he slept.

  He remembered a sheltered place with mud walls, an ancient place built on the ruins of an earlier civilization, a fairly well-traveled road, an approach to a mountain pass, but a place he had never been before. Such places are scattered across the deserts of the world, but where was this one? Could it be they went back in time and only he was allowed to return?

  Arbutus howled from beyond the wall of the tent. He thought, What beautiful dreams the insane must occasionally have: the violin, the green apple, people who love each other, people who gaze hopefully, people who forgive, God.

  He could make out his brother’s form on the cot beside his own. He lay with his hands behind his head and made blue cigarette smoke. He rarely slept in his cot and usually slept with the horses.

  “Are you awake?” Napoleon said.

  “You’re not dead yet?”

  “No. Not lately.”

  “Good.”

  “Koons?”

  “Koons? He died.”

  “Let me share that cigarette,” he said, and his brother reached it over to him.

  The memories began again to take him. He knew he died out there and when he died the old world died with him, but it made no difference because the new world would likewise be a world of killing and in most ways indistinguishable from the old world.

  “Preston,” Napoleon said.

  “He was a complete bastard, that one. May he go to the hot place.”

  His brother lit another cigarette from the one they’d been smoking and they shared this one too.

  “Now what are you thinking?” his brother said, spitting a fleck of tobacco from between his teeth.

  “Nothing. I was just away in my mind.” He shrugged his shoulders. The question meant little to him. There was no meaning in any of it.

  “Can’t remember?”

  “No. Not really,” he said, and it was true, he could not.

  19

  WHEN HE CAME from sleep it was in daylight and he was lying on his cot. He tried to think, but it was difficult and when he did he could not understand his thoughts. He closed his eyes to help his memory and for all there was to remember, he remembered nothing.

  He opened his eyes again and his brother was sitting beside him as if just come in and Teddy was at the opening, several feet of a diamond-patterned macardy rope as if emerging from his thigh. He asked after the hand mirror and in the mirror he learned his eyes were shoe black and his stitched face gaunt and worn down as the predead.

  In this moment he felt himself again to have returned.

  “What o’clock is it?” he said.

  “Maybe six.”

  “Which one? The first or the second.”

  “The second one,” his brother said. He’d been to the Chinaman in town to drop off their wash and brought back chop suey and chowchow and chopsticks to eat with.

  “Where’s the whisky?” he asked.

  “Right here,” his brother said, holding up a bottle.

  “I got a bastard behind my eyes.”

  “There’s candy for you,” his brother said, shaking the bottle by the neck.

  “Give it here,” he said.

  “You want that on the rocks?”

  “Yes.”

  His brother chipped ice from under his cot and poured the whisky into glasses.

  “God, that’s refreshing,” Xenophon said, taking a drink from his own glass as he passed the other. “Drink that,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  “What kind of ice is that?” he asked, holding the glass up to the light and seeing through its amber transparency.

  “I believe it’s the kind made with water.”

  “Water?”

  “Water that has been frozen.”

  “What’ll they think of next?”

  He took a deep drink, the liquor sluicing his cheeks and neck. It stung and numbed his cut lips. He perched the glass on his belly and wiped his stinging mouth. He took another tilt at the glass and this time he did better.

  “My mouth don’t work so good right now,” he said and made a broken smile.

  “It will.”

  “Now I can see you better,” he said, after another slopping drink.

  His brother struck a match and lit the smoky wick in a Coleman lantern for them to eat by.

  “How long have I been sleeping?”

  “The yesterday before the yesterday before. Maybe longer.”

  “I was somewhat crazy for a time.”

  “Some business.”

  “I died out there,” he said.

  “You look alive to me.”

  “The person I was died out there.”

  “Quit your talk like that. Eat some of this food.”

  “I was dead and now I am someone else,” Napoleon said.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know who, but I am different now.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “Do you think there’s more?” he said.

  “More what?”

  “Just more,” he said, letting his hand to indicate expanse.

  “No,” his brother said, picking up his glass and looking into it.

  “I don’t think so either.”

  “It’s still a good question to ask from time to time.”

  “Just to remind yourself.”

  “Yes,” Xenophon said.
r />   “Nobody gives a fuck.”

  “Not really.”

  His brother looked up from his glass. He told him how when they found him he wasn’t alive, at least as they could tell. As best they could figure it, he was dead of sun.

  “Where we found you,” he said, holding his hand as if settling air, “we cut no trail of man nor animal, not even your trail into there. Nothing.”

  “Bandy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bad damn luck that one.”

  “That one didn’t know his ass from his elbow.”

  “He was a good one,” Napoleon said, though he knew the boy was useless and at times could be pretty mouthy.

  “He wasn’t bad.”

  “Bandy was coming along so good,” he persisted, and to that his brother shrugged and took a pull from his drink. Napoleon tipped out his own glass into his mouth until it was empty and held it up for another.

  “Teddy,” his brother called out, an invitation to eat some food and have a drink, but the Apache ignored him.

  “I thought I might get in the stock tank tonight,” he said. “Soak a little.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  His brother poured more drinks and then another pair after the third and they continued their drinking in the last shards of daylight.

  “I’ll tell you what that horse did,” he said, and then he told how the Rattler horse bit the face off the man.

  “He weren’t no shy horse.”

  He paused, a hand over his forehead, and sighed deeply. Tonight he felt the loss of the Rattler as acutely as he felt the loss of the men. His brother suggested they have a drink to the Rattler horse and filled their glasses again with chipped ice and whisky.

  “There ain’t nothing more to say,” his brother said, holding up his glass. “Some don’t make it.”

  The whisky was the best medicine to be drinking and in memorializing the Rattler horse he remembered how a life might be and the thoughts in his mind became well built for a time and were as if printed black on a white card.