Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

  “It’s hot today, just plain hot,’” someone said.

  “Hot? I think it’s damn cold myself. I wish I had my blanket,” someone answered.

  Some half-wild horses came to the edge of a hill. They caught his brother’s eye and he stopped. The horses stamped and snorted and stepped in their direction. He knew his brother would leave off the search and go after them if he thought even one of interest. The horses fluttered and panicked and ducked away and there being none of particular interest he let them go.

  All that morning Xenophon stayed close by his side, for the most part silent unless someone needed a bawling-out.

  “I am sick of wet-nursing these fucking neck riders,” he said, “every one of them.” Looking for the body of this man, he could not think of a more foolhardy way to spend his time.

  “What time is it?” Napoleon asked him when he’d calmed down.

  “Noon, I’d say. Why?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “No. I don’t think it’s the kind of tired you get over.”

  He was tired. He wanted a room and a goose-down bed. He wanted a square meal, a shave, a hot bath. He didn’t know what all he wanted beyond that, but he knew what he didn’t want and he didn’t want what he had and he didn’t want where he was. He wanted to think clearly again and live without the guilt he felt for losing the men: Bandy, Extra Billy, Stableforth, Turner, and even Preston.

  “What made you come out here?” Napoleon asked him.

  “I do not want these brainless bastards ruining any of my horses.”

  This is what his brother said, but he suspected another reason and one having to do with his own understanding of the men they rode with, the men in their command with prospects of bounty.

  “It takes little carelessness to disable a horse,” his brother said. “You care for the horse first and yourself last.” He was strangely enough their greatest defender and yet capable of working them to an inch of their lives. But he asked no more of the horse than he asked of himself.

  Napoleon held a palm to his forehead and stared intently at the land before the horizon where a flash of light had shown. They climbed the red sun-baked rocks of the plateau and with a pocket mirror signaled across the valley. It wasn’t long before a signal came back.

  “There’s something there,” he said.

  The Blue horse crabbed sideways and he looked to where his brother was pointing and he saw it too. There was a critter walking backward dragging a half-eaten carcass. It was a feral dog or a coyote, maybe a wolf. But there was something else and it was the strangest thing he saw. It was not important, but he could not tell what it was.

  It was here the Jenny found them, buzzing overhead with the intention of spotting and directing their way.

  His brother turned in the saddle as the column closed, the Smith boys coming up first.

  “Smith,” he said.

  “Yessir.”

  “Not you. The other Smith.”

  “Yessir!”

  “You do not hit that horse,” he bawled at the soldier, and raising an admonitory finger, he said, “That horse has a muscle cramp. You get off that horse and you walk it out.”

  “I miss that old Rattler horse,” Napoleon said.

  “That horse were as sure footed as a mule,” his brother said.

  “I hope we don’t find it,” he said, meaning the worst.

  “Tell me again about the horse she rode.”

  “It was a beauty,” he said. “About the most beautiful horse a horse can be.”

  “I would love to see that horse someday.”

  “It was a gifted horse.”

  “A royal horse.”

  “What do you think that was back there?”

  “You saw it too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just one of those things.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The first one they found they could smell the decay a mile away. The flensers had been at work. His naked body looked parboiled by the sun. He was hung upside down from the stark white branch of a dead cottonwood. He’d been belly cut and leg cut and his skin dragged off him so a whole other body shape sharing the one head hung down below.

  On the rocks around the man were perched the vultures. They carried the scavengers featherless head and neck. They were not moving because when they looked at the men on horseback they only saw scavengers like themselves.

  “Do you think he’s one of ours,” one of the troopers was saying.

  “I wouldn’t know how to tell,” another said.

  “He’s too tall to be a greaser. How tall would you say he is?”

  “I can’t tell. He is upside down.”

  “It’s still the same length, you fucknut.”

  “Whoever did this needs to bounce at the end of a rope.”

  “I just hope he was dead,” the Baldwin-Felts agent said.

  “If he were what would have been the point?” his brother said.

  “An artist with a knife,” Goudge said. “I’ll give ’em that.”

  “This needs to be investigated,” the Baldwin-Felts agent said. “They can’t do that to an American.”

  “When are you going to get your head out of your ass?” Xenophon said as he rolled a cigarette.

  “That ain’t one of us. I think it’s the dynamiter,” Napoleon said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just a feeling. He signed on and took their money and didn’t know what he claimed to know. I’ll say one thing. He didn’t lack for hide.”

  The chaplain and the photographer drew closer. The chaplain stooped down on one knee and began to pray at the feet of the boy dynamiter. The Jenny flew over, its engine coughing.

  When the chaplain stood again, he said, “Nothing is so solemn as a man’s last moments of life.”

  “He’ll just be a hole in the ground, is all,” Napoleon said.

  When the chaplain protested he told him to take his form of mental illness somewhere else. The photographer was already returning with the weight of his equipment on his shoulder.

  “What do you want to do, sir?” one of the troopers asked him.

  He nodded toward the Baldwin-Felts agent. “How about this body?” he said. “Will this one do for you?”

  “Not if it isn’t him.”

  “Cut him down and bury him,” he told the dismounted troopers. The photographer asked for a moment as he erected his tripod, his camera fixed on top and the men held back so the photographer could do his work.

  Miles in the distance his brother glassed a column of vultures riding what little eddies the upper air afforded. He yelled out for the men to come on and get the work done of cutting the man down. He could tell his brother’s agitation as it was translated to the chestnut whose broad hooves cut patterned didoes in the dirt.

  “Goudge,” Napoleon yelled, “get it done. We’re wasting time,” and then he turned the Blue horse and was following his brother who’d broke for the vultures.

  The gyring vultures guided them on and after a long time they came across another dead, a Yaqui in rictus clutching an open gunnysack at the mouth of a canyon. There was a rattlesnake fastened to his face, its fangs set deep, attached to his cheek. The outriders had already arrived and were crouched on their haunches and staring into the man’s claggy, dead eyes.

  “He’s dead all right,” one of the outriders said.

  “He’s jined the dead,” the other one said, looking up at them. “Snake bit him.”

  “That’ll mean fewer idiots around,” the first one said.

  He led them on and soon they entered into the canyon. The air by moment was burdened with the stench of death. As the rock walls rose and closed he felt again to be entering the whelm of his greatest loss and it wasn’t long before they found three more and these were their men and there were horses too, the Rattler horse amongst them. He looked out at the sight before them.

  Great swarms of
flies occupied the air of the killing floor. They buzzed and lit and stung. Someone behind him swore softly. Then they all fell silent, taking their own hard looks.

  Napoleon dismounted and stood again in the hard place where he’d fought and lost. He felt to be migrating close up under the sky, how terrible was this moment on earth when the earth split open and devils poured out.

  They’d been stripped of their tunics and trousers, their boots and hats and weapons and the horses of their shoes and furnishings. They were naked and their sun-drained and waxlike bodies torn open where coyotes and vultures had been at them. Their bodies looked parboiled and then baked in the sun. They had certain characteristics that men have, but they were not like men at all. The scene was prehistoric, a windswept abattoir, silent music playing through the ravaged rib cages. After the first time you looked at them they were not hard to look at.

  He kneeled down and laid his hand on the fine flat shoulder of the Rattler horse. The magnificent horse had given him all that it had to give. There was nothing more he could have asked.

  “That would be Turner,” Napoleon said.

  “How do you know?” the agent asked.

  “A double-barreled shotgun don’t leave much face bone.”

  In some places the earth was no more than spilled powder and in other places the sand was hard and the black of lacquer.

  He went on to identify Stableforth, the back of his skull blown away and Extra Billy, whose head was broke open. Someone had taken the time to knock out his brains after he was killed the second time.

  Life had been separated from matter and all that was left now lay before him exposed and lifeless. He knew too much and he’d seen too much. It was enough. He took out a paper and his tobacco and with steady hands he rolled a cigarette.

  “Look up there,” someone said, and they all turned to look and to see another festooned with vultures. He hung from the rock wall, high up, his legs and arms spread wide and his chest pushed out with the contour of the rock. They could make out the bony haunches and the stringy arms. His eyes were dry holes in his head and the rock beneath his bare feet was a long ragged stain of black. It was Bandy, who tried to climb away like he was told.

  That boy, he thought, was ignorant as an egg.

  Men began shooting the vultures, errantly introducing enough lead into the boy’s body to make it dance on its bindings.

  Wheeler, his rage barely in check, flew at them until they stopped and then it was Wheeler who climbed the wall and lowered down the ragged and tattered and newly shot being that was his friend. He would not let anyone help him in this work. He cradled him gently in his arms and insisted in wrapping him in an oilcloth to take him back for a proper burial.

  Napoleon watched Wheeler in his work. He flashed on a future when there would be a world of such figures. They would be found upon rocks such as this one or lying in the mud or forest or desert. They’d be floating to the bottom of the ocean. They’d be boys and women and children. They’d be young men. But who would be left to find them? The old men, that’s who. The old men will endure.

  Bandy, Extra Billy—they were good men, he thought. Beyond the frailties of moment and personality they were men who would fight to the last measure and what more could you ask of a man? They had no illusions of invincibility. They insisted upon no right to innocence.

  “They were good men,” Napoleon finally said aloud.

  “They were,” his brother said, and mounted the chestnut and turned the horse in the direction from which they’d come.

  “This is where it ends,” he said.

  “Do you not remember anything more?” the agent said.

  “We were on a trail and we got off the trail somewhere.”

  “Do you not remember where?”

  “If I could remember, I wouldn’t do it on your account,” he said, his patience with this man now exhausted.

  “I don’t like it,” the Baldwin-Felts agent said.

  “What do you like?” Napoleon said.

  The Blue horse was behind him, thrusting its nose, smooth as silk, under his elbow. He turned to it and rubbed its forehead. The horse lowered its head until it was pressed against his chest and he stroked its glossy neck.

  “Leave it alone,” Goudge said to the Baldwin-Felts agent.

  “Leave it alone? How can he not remember?” The agent persisted.

  When the detective would not relent his brother turned the chestnut horse fiercely and spurred forward. He rode hard the short distance he’d traveled, pulled up, and came off the animal in one motion.

  It was not his brother’s way to reason, or argue. His brother struck the agent and struck hard as if the man was just another animal wandering the earth and then he walked away to where the chestnut stood patient and quiet.

  The agent lay stunned on the ground nursing the side of his head already glowing with the red bruise that would turn blue and then purple. Goudge went to him and helped him onto his feet. He sputtered with outrage and threat.

  “He tried to kill me.”

  “You ain’t dead, are you?” Goudge said.

  “No.”

  “Then he didn’t try.”

  “They don’t turn the other cheek, mister,” the first Smith said.

  “They ain’t even got an other cheek,” the second Smith said.

  He knew they’d never find Preston’s body and it was pointless to try. His body would be dragged for miles, dragged until there was nothing left at the end of the rope. Who knew that his body wasn’t still being dragged and what little of it remained was just now wearing out and dropping away and disappearing forever.

  Did they really want the truth, especially this truth? Perhaps it is so; people cannot bear the mystery of disappearance. But Preston’s disappearance, however unbearable, was better than the truth.

  Blowing their way was a dirty smoke and soon they could hear its crackling on the air. From over sky distance came the sound of a grinding engine. The engine coughed and sputtered and went out. To the north the photographer had caught fire to the brush and to the south the Jenny had gone down beyond the sun-tinted mountains.

  There was a mottling of western light. The deaths of the men was an episode closed, their remains wrapped and trussed in a tight bundles, their bodies as light and fleshless as kindling. When the moon rose that night, the stars in the sky were red as blood and they were a long straggling troop returning from their mission. The pilot of the Jenny, his leg in a splint rode with them. Some men watched the stars in their coming while others sat on their horses asleep, their shoulders folded and heads bobbing. It was late that day, long past darkness, when they sifted past the fixed sentinels and back into camp. The arc lights crackled on the perimeter and then they went out.

  22

  MOST PEOPLE WANTED to be someone or something else but not him, not his brother. They never thought they were anything but what they were. They were cavalrymen and life on horseback was the only life they knew, and yet on this night he went to see the General, to tell him he was leaving.

  “Home?” the General said.

  “I’d like to see my father,” he told the General.

  “What about your brother?”

  “Just me.”

  The General lifted his glasses and settled them lower on his nose that he might look over the tops of them. The two brothers were his intractable men. They were his worst soldiers but his most loyal, most dependable, most efficient, most lethal men. He could not have stood a hundred men like them because that was not how armies were made, but two, or five, that did nicely.

  The General took up a piece of paper and an ink pen and asked him when he signed on, how many years ago, but he could not remember.

  “A long time ago,” the General said, and began writing.

  It was last year the General lost his family: his wife and his little girls. They burned to death at the Presidio while he was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. It was in January Villa killed American mine
engineers on the Chihuahua train and then two months later he’d attacked Columbus, New Mexico.

  The General put down his pen and leaned over to blow the last ink dry. He took off his rimless spectacles and let them dangle at the ends of his fingers. He watched the General moving his lips as he read the orders he’d written. He put his finger on the line he was reading to hold his place before looking up. His eyes became very bright and shined in his head as if he’d seen the unseen.

  “They say,” he began, “that young people think they can’t die. They do not understand its potential. I disagree. It is simply the fact that young people are stupid and thank you for that because we need them to fight our wars.”

  “Some come back alive and some don’t.”

  “I was wondering if, when you are in that place, you know anything.”

  “Which place would that be?” Napoleon said.

  “Heaven. Hell. Does it make much difference?”

  “No. I don’t believe it does.”

  “Either way I guess they know now.” The General set down the letter and took out a cigarette and struck a match. He had a habit of lighting a match and holding it while he talked and forgetting to use it and then lighting another.

  “Is this for good?” he asked, seeming to come from a trance.

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Have you ever thought about getting out altogether?”

  “I can’t say that I ever have.”

  “We’ve had some times,” the General said.

  “We have.”

  “I would be honored if you would have a drink with me.”

  The General took a bottle from a locker and two glasses and for a time they were just two old men, raw boned and hollow bellied, in the company of each other.

  “I should like to meet your father some day,” the General said, holding up his glass.

  “My father?”

  “Yes.”

  “He surely had himself some times.”

  “Tough old birds back then.”

  “They took a lot of killing.”

  “This god damn goose chase is a discredit to war.”