Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

  Outside the lanterns were being lit and their yellow circles of light were merging into one. Inside, the tent blued and shadowed, but as always there was enough light to drink.

  From two soldiers passing by came a snip of conversation.

  “Where’s Dolly?”

  “She’s got the grippe. A temperature of one hundred and four degrees.”

  “Sick?”

  “Sick as a bastard.”

  These passing conversations were as if their own and human voice sufficient enough that they did not need to talk. They watched Teddy’s hands in the opening, as he worked the horsehair, the diamond-patterned macardy emerging from his side.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Reins.”

  “Where’d he learn that? The reservation?”

  “Prison, I think.”

  “Same difference.”

  It was then the chaplain came to call. The chaplain was a jolly fellow, a friend to everyone. But he thought the chaplain was a fool. He never had any use for religion anyway. He could not understand the idiocy of finding goodness in things evil and was scornful of such thinking. The man meant no more than a tick to him. Neither Teddy nor his brother were about to admit him entry, but drinking as he was, he waved them off and the bustling man made his entrance.

  “What happened out there?” the chaplain said.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “A Baldwin-Felts agent has arrived,” the chaplain said, and explained the agent was a representative of Preston’s family.

  “It’d take days to tell.”

  “Can you tell me about his final moments?”

  “Who?”

  “Champ Preston’s.”

  “There ain’t nothing to tell,” Napoleon said.

  “He was shot?”

  “Among other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “It don’t matter and knowing doesn’t change anything.”

  “He didn’t say anything before he died?”

  “Why?”

  “They’ll want to know everything.”

  “When they do they’ll wish they hadn’t.”

  “How can this happen?” the chaplain fretted.

  “War is war,” he said. “It ain’t a new idea.”

  “It was God reminding us of his presence.”

  “I don’t believe I needed the lesson.”

  “I will pray for you,” the chaplain said.

  “You prick. Who will pray for you?”

  Later that night he eased himself over the side of the stock tank and into the night-cooled water. At first he found relief and then suddenly he desperately needed to get out. He had the overwhelming sense of being weighed down and drowned. He cried out and flailed his way back over the edge where his brother helped him drag himself over the side where he flopped down into the mud.

  The capacious blisters that covered his body had filled with tank water and were dragging him down and this had caused his panic. When he struggled to his feet the blisters were ballooned in great filled sacks on his back and legs and thighs and arms. When he stood, they drained of their fluid and water and it jetted from him in a dozen spurting leaks.

  The next morning his burned dead skin was yellow and crusted. His brother methodically peeled it from his body in tattered sheets. With scissors he snipped away the dead skin as close to the living skin as he dared and applied a wash of cider vinegar to his burns. He could feel the heat’s rapid evaporation from his skin and suffered another bout of body shivers and teeth chattering. His brother cracked eggs over him and when the albumen dried he rolled him up in the sheeting and lay on top of him, but the shakes had lessened over the days and were not so severe. Finally they subsided. His skin relieved, he dozed.

  The next night he went back into the stock tank again where he floated underneath the stars and breathed the warm night air with a dozen horses in attendance, drinking, snorting, and waffling their open nostrils on his head and neck and shoulders.

  He spread his fingers and let his palms touch the water. There came the sharp yodeling bark of a coyote across the dark plain and then it was silent again. In his mind he rode out and entered another valley of sameness. He rode in on campfires and listened without being seen. At each turn there seemed to be an unfolding, a revealing, a presentation of what was simple in element and complex in nature. He’d become a creature of darkness. The pain inside him was becoming only the barb of memory to him.

  “Tell me again how it went,” his brother said, gratefully intruding on his thoughts.

  “It went some big,” he said, his mind returning to the Andalusian and the woman who rode it.

  “How big?”

  “It went like it had a fire inside. Like its joints were knit from spring steel.”

  “And the other horses?”

  “Two of them were golden duns with tiger eyes. They carried the heads of kilt men.”

  “The others?”

  “I already told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  The next day when he awoke he was ambulatory and felt as recovered as he would ever be. He dressed himself and ate in the great kitchen while the fat cook sweated over his stoves. From the firing range he could hear the threading fire of the machine guns. The Mexican serving girls came and went, lugging out platters full of food and returning with empty ones. He was slow to realize, but then understood how every last one of them knew his story, knew what recently occurred. They said nothing to him but kept his plate full. They would have spoken to a dog but not to him.

  20

  LIFE IN THE ARMY was a thin empty ritual, even when wounded and healing, broken and mending, burned and growing new skin. Death was the same way. It was slow or fast or somewhere in between, except with death you did not come back and you could not use yourself again.

  Word came to him they’d been out looking for the men and had no luck and were waiting on his recuperation so they could learn whatever information he might have. After the chaplain’s visit, his brother had refused admittance to anyone else and nobody dared to cross him. The country had been thought not dangerous, but now they knew better. They also knew it might be dangerous tomorrow or not dangerous again and this uncertainty unsettled them. None of them had ever seen Villa. They thought they did, but they were not sure and in this way they came to be fighting no one in this land, and everyone.

  The Baldwin-Felts agent, when he arrived at their tent, was a slit-eyed fellow with a lean and bitten face. He was well over six feet tall with a broad chest. He had a narrow forehead and a thin-bridged nose. He wore a well-tended handlebar mustache, sported a mallocca cane, and was dressed in tan brush drills. He carried a pencil behind his ear and had the air of one who looked down his nose at the world over the brow of that handlebar mustache.

  “He needs to talk to you to ask you a few questions,” his brother said, and when he shrugged—I don’t care—his brother ushered him in.

  “How are you doing?” the Baldwin-Felts agent asked as he extended his hand.

  “I’m not feeling too chipper yet, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You don’t look too good.”

  “Same to you.”

  “I am down here to find Champ Preston,” he said, and began to rub the gold knob on his cane.

  “What in hell was he doing here anyways?”

  “He told his mother and father he was coming here because he wanted to experience life to the very edge. What do you think of that?”

  “Edge of what?”

  “I don’t know exactly.” The Baldwin-Felts agent sighed dramatically, an enduring man who assumed responsibility for tidying the world of his benefactors.

  “Who does?”

  “His mother and father seem to.” He took out a small notebook and the pencil from behind his ear.

  “Tell them it weren’t nobody’s fault,” he said. “Tell them he died a proper death.”

  “He is dead then?”

  “
He is dead,” he said.

  “You witnessed his death?”

  “I seen him kilt.”

  The agent sighed again and took a step back. With this declaration, by eyewitness, the agent suspended his questioning for the moment. No doubt it was the news he feared and anticipated. He bared his teeth, revealing a gold incisor.

  “His remains?”

  “They’re dead too.”

  “Yes, that’s what I figured. Their location?”

  “Out there,” he said, and cast a look southeast—still out there and he ain’t coming back.

  “Can you take me there?”

  “I can, but you won’t find nothing you’ll want to find.”

  “His grieving family needs a body for the salve to their grief. This, of course, you understand.”

  “Not this body.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’d be better off sending them a box of rocks nailed shut.”

  “Did he fight well?” the agent asked. “Can I at least tell them that he fought well?”

  “There weren’t no fight in the end.”

  “For instance, did he sacrifice himself so that you or others might survive the ordeal?”

  “There aren’t no others and there weren’t no sacrifice. They did to us what they wanted to do.”

  “Would you say he fought like a bear cat?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Like a bear cat,” he mouthed as he penciled the words into his notebook.

  “Tell them he fell with his eyes facing the enemy.”

  “That’s good. I will tell them that.” He touched the pencil to the tip of his tongue and wrote down these words as well.

  “After the first suffering he suffered very little and then he was dead.”

  “The body?”

  “The body? Well, it’s gone somewheres.”

  “Can you call to mind where exactly it happened? The more shocking the experience the more clearly one often remembers.”

  “There’s nothing I want to remember.”

  To this the agent smiled. Every time he smiled he showed a mouthful of white teeth and the gold incisor beneath his mustache. He was sucking some sort of lozenge and had a habit of clicking it against his teeth. As he reviewed what he’d written, he moved the notebook back and forth before his eyes.

  “What exactly are you saying?” the agent asked.

  “I’m saying, he went rough.”

  “The body. Gentlemen, I beg you,” he said, but there was no beg in his voice. “The family without the body cannot grieve. What to do about the body?” He held up his hands — cane, notebook, pencil—we have to do something.

  “He needs a body,” his brother said.

  “Do you need his body, or will any body do?”

  “I need his body,” he said in final exasperation, and then told them that the General would like to see the both of them. He then removed himself from their tent and waited in the opening.

  When they arrived at the General’s quarters the General eyed him sternly, a look he’d seen before. The General was always admonishing him and his brother to be more careful with themselves. They were neither of them any longer the boys they had once been.

  “Sit down,” the General said, placing himself on the nearest chair, draping his left leg over his right.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “As the dog says, rough.”

  “They say you died out there.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Well, yes,” the General said. “That’s what they say.”

  “It must be true then.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Then the agent spoke up, reminding the General the status of the family he represented, their influence, and how grave his responsibilities. He further made it known, jabbing the brass tip of his cane into the dust, that he was empowered to honor any outstanding debts left by his man and men were already lining up with their dry and brittle papers bearing their name, the letters IOU, a number with a dollar sign, some rather substantial, and Champ Preston’s signature.

  Furthermore, the family would generously bear the cost of an expedition to find the body and to the man who actually found the body, there would be a substantial reward. Of these gestures he’d made the camp aware.

  “Your man here is being very difficult,” he said in conclusion.

  “And your man was a peckerhead and a smirking bastard,” the General declared.

  “He was gaining experience. We’ll soon need all the leaders we can muster.”

  “Experience for what? His was a mind not enlarged one iota by anything it experienced.”

  “I am sure his father will appreciate the observation. His father is a very influential man.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about his father,” the General said.

  “The nation is going to war.”

  “Go to war? You think we have any business going to war? Look inside that crate you are sitting on.”

  The crate was draped with a tarp and used as a bench.

  “Open it,” the General said, flashing the back of his hand, and when the man did he found it to contain lances.

  “Lances,” the General said with disgust. “They send me lances.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “Your man was a man with a reckless ass,” the General told the agent, “and I put up with him, but I’d not take him into any army of mine.”

  “Be that as it may General, he is my man.”

  “Leave us alone here,” the General said, and with that the agent was dismissed.

  Alone, the three men did not stand on the empty ceremony of rank. The General pulled at his chin and mentioned he needed to find a razor blade somewhere. Outside, a pickup game had begun and men were throwing a football back and forth. Skirls of dust scraped by as the wind made a brief tearing sound and then it was quiet again and he could almost hear the rivings of blown sand finding a new place on the earth until blown again.

  Napoleon felt the presence of his brother, standing behind him at the tent’s opening, arms folded, chin on his chest, one foot in front of the other—that’s how he was.

  For the longest time no man broke the spell of silence. They were long past acknowledging the trials of their existence, the daily boredom, the sudden violence.

  He believed the General in that moment was experiencing again the loss of his family. One of his best and most beloved men had returned from the dead, but his wife and his little girls had yet to do so. How much longer would he have to wait for them to return from the dead?

  “Give me your thoughts,” the General finally said.

  “They had a cache of goods and stores stol’d from here.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I have never seen the likes of them before.”

  “Do you know anything about a map?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Every god damn jerk-off in this army thinks Preston held a treasure map.”

  “Just a bunch of fuck-offs if you ask me.”

  “I won’t ask you to make peace with this man,” the General said. “But you know as well as I do these men will not rest until they find who did this and give to them an ass-whuppin’. That means a lot of innocent people.”

  “I will not make peace with the man, but I will make peace with the situation.”

  He knew he would have to go back out so as not to deprive the men of a possible bounty. He knew if he did not go, the men would extract vengeance on every unfortunate they encountered who could not explain himself.

  21

  THE CAMP IN MORNING was a lowing and braying racket. They woke at four and were under way by five, the dull pallid gray of the dawn filtering its shuttered red light into the darkness. The horse he rode that morning was the Blue horse, the high-white blue-black sabino with the two blue eyes. Whereas the Rattler horse was the spirit of evil, the Blue horse was friendly and could not help but seek affectio
n. It wished to be petted and nibbled him with its lips until he did.

  His brother rode a powerful seventeen-hand chestnut, a brown-coated horse with a long mane and tail. The chestnut was a most skillful and well-knitted animal and he’d not seen a more handsome clean-built and graceful horse. With the subtlest gesture of hand the horse made right and left and stopped on a dime. It cut turns like a knife and did not so much run as it flew and danced. He smiled and wondered how long before the animal would disappoint and fall out of favor.

  In the past he was often mistaken for his brother but not any longer. His face was cut and broken and changed forever and now it was only his own. And something else—it was as if the aura of the brothers was broken, the mysterious nimbus of their remote autonomy had been breached. For most men this was troubling. The brothers were so capable they made other men lazy and dependent. Other men were now emboldened: the envious and resentful, the invidious. These were the men who remembered every slight, every warning, every reprimand. These were the fatuous, the strivers, the self-opinionated. They were the mediocrity that knows nothing higher than itself and in their minds they’d been mistreated and were now the aggrieved.

  This he sensed as they rode out that morning. If his brother sensed it also, he did not know. If he did he would not have cared. A man to him was less than a horse and not more than a dog or a toad. So deep were his convictions in this regard they were beyond the comprehension of all but the Apache or the horse itself, or the dog, or the toad.

  They broke from the plain and were following a small alkaline streambed, dry and dusty, in the direction of a distant grove of cottonwoods. They’d left behind the train tracks, the cartage road, the abandoned hacienda when late that afternoon a dry storm broke and day lightning struck clean as a razor. Breathing on this day was as if breathing the air of a furnace and he could not help but continually shade his eyes with his hand and stare at the horizon as if he knew what was there and waiting to be seen.

  All that morning they’d set a hammering pace, the horses’ bodies lathered with oily sweat. Only when the sun was getting well up in the sky he swung their trail in the direction of a stone tank where they watered. They could have stopped at noon or pushed straight on through.

  He let the stop be enough to rest the horses. A great wave of hot air swept by, filling their lungs with heat. The moment was so hot that to breathe deeply was to choke and cough.