Code of the West

by Aaron Latham

  But the red canyon was still an empty house. Jimmy Crying Coyote’s questions were turning into concerns. Now he urged Mister into a trot. He was in a hurry to get some place, but he wasn’t sure where.

  He scanned the ground as he passed over it, looking for shoeless Goddog tracks, searching for any trace of the Humans. He saw lots of Human-cattle spoor. He found the place where a herd of deer had come down to the river to drink, carving beautiful tracks with their chisel hooves. He paused where raccoons had visited the stream to wash their food before they ate it. They left miniature hand prints in the clay. He even saw the tracks of a couple of bears and one mountain lion. But he did not see any Goddog tracks or any other sign of the Humans. He was beginning to get frightened.

  Jimmy Crying Coyote took his cap-and-ball revolver out of his holster and raised it over his head. Its grip felt strangely like a plow handle in his hand. He thumbed back the heavy hammer and shot a hole in the bright heavens. The reverberation seemed to shake the red walls that appeared to hold up the blue ceiling. The Humansmust hear such an explosion. They were either very frightened, pulling deeper into their holes, or they weren’t in their favorite canyon at all. He stood up in his stirrups as if a few inches more would help him to find what was lost in this vast place. He fired two more shots. He stood in his saddle again. Still nothing. He emptied his gun at the sky as if the single cloud up there were his enemy. He didn’t rise in his stirrups this time because he didn’t think it would do any good. He rode on in silence, sinking lower in the saddle with every mile, but he kept going.

  The sun was sinking and the heavens reddening to match the canyon when he saw the two buzzards circling, black specks in a red world. He shivered either because of the cool of the evening or because of the specters overhead. Turning Mister Goddog, he left the river and tried to follow the buzzards. He wanted to see what they saw. Or rather he didn’t want to see it, but he had to find out. He rode into an arm of the canyon that was a small canyon itself. Kicking Mister, he galloped, stirring up a red cloud.

  When he saw the bones, Jimmy Crying Coyote let out another cry. It was not a war cry. It was not a hailing cry, for he no longer had any hope of the Humans hearing him. It was a cry of mourning. For he believed he had found the Human Beings at last. The bones completely filled the little canyon. The canyon was a vast open grave.

  Jimmy Goodnight pulled Mister Goddog to a halt. He didn’t want to see any more, but he urged his horse forward once again and headed deeper into the canyon. He continued to stare at the ground, not because he was looking for tracks, but because he had found the place where all tracks ended. He walked his mount, then trotted, then galloped. He had to see and be sure.

  Reaching the mountain of bones, Jimmy Crying Coyote jumped from his horse. He swayed on his feet as if he were drunk. Picking up a large bone, he wondered how such a giant could ever have lost a battle. Then he reminded himself that guns killed giants and dwarfs alike. But then he picked up a skull that was too big to be a Human skull, too large even to be the skull of the largest giant. It was the unmistakable skull of a Goddog. Climbing the mountain of bones, Jimmy Crying Coyote found more huge skulls, more great leg bones. He examined enormous bone chains that were the spinal columns of Goddogs. There weren’t any horseshoes, so he knew who these animals had once belonged to. Climbing the white mountain, his boots slipped and skidded on bones. He fell on bones. He rolled in bones.

  The former Human Being kept looking for Human bones mixed in with the bones of their Goddogs, but thankfully he found none. All he saw were the bones of their mounts. He could not imagine what had happened, but he knew that it must have been a terrible disaster for the Humans. Their wealth had been destroyed. They must now be a poor people. They were probably also hungry since they would not be able to hunt the Human-cattle without their Goddogs.

  Examining the bones more closely, he found round holes in many of the skulls. They had been shot. They had been systematically murdered by an enemy with an endless supply of bullets and cruelty. He thought it over carefully: the only people with access to that many bullets had to be the United States Army. He tried to count the skulls, but it was impossible, there were so many of them. He figured maybe a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred, maybe as many as two thousand dead Goddogs. The greatest riders in the history of the world would now have to hunt their food and face their enemies on foot.

  Jimmy Crying Coyote, Human Being, sat on the mountain of bones and sang a death song for his people: “O Sun, you live forever, but we must die. O Earth, you remain forever, but we must die.”

  6

  Goodnight felt two ways about the cowboys who smoked. He dis-approved of the use of tobacco, but he still felt sorry for his boys who were addicted to it because they had long since run out. Every morning, Goodnight watched with amusement what had become a regular ritual. One by one, the cowboys would shamble over to the large stump of an old cedar tree where they would get down on their knees. Were they praying? No, they were picking up old, dry, ugly coffee grounds. Every morning after breakfast, Coffee the cook would bang his old, dented coffee pot against the cedar stump to knock out the dregs. And every afternoon, the cowboys would drop by the stump, pick up the dry grounds, roll them inside cigarette papers, and smoke them. Too Short rolled, lit up, and then made a face. Goodnight smiled.

  Tobacco wasn’t the only thing the Home Ranch was out of. They didn’t have any flour or cornmeal. They didn’t even have any beans. They ate meat three meals a day. Wild turkey for breakfast. Bear meat in the middle of the day. And buffalo at night. For variety, they would switch the meats around.

  And then they ran out of coffee, too.

  Goodnight was especially fond of buffalo meat, which he had come to love during his life as a Human Being, but his cowboys didn’t like it much. They thought it was too tough. Most white men would shoot a buffalo and skin it and cut out its tongue and leave the rest for the flies and buzzards. But Goodnight insisted on using the entire buffalo. The steaks were broiled. The marrow bones were roasted and then cracked open. The tongue was buried in coals overnight. Goodnight loved buffalo, but even he would not have minded having a biscuit to go along with it. The shortages led inevitably to short tempers. Flare-ups were most likely to happen at mealtimes when the boys were most reminded of what they didn’t have.

  “Hey, Too Short,” Simon said one night at supper, “I heard some disappointed lady was the one give you your nickname. Any truth to that there rumor?”

  “Goddamn you!” growled Too Short.

  He threw his dinner—buffalo steak again—at Simon and then dove on top of him. Tin plates and tin cups went every which way. Food landed in the dirt. The two brawlers rolled into the campfire and hurriedly out again.

  “Black Dub, you wanna break that up?” Goodnight asked.

  Black Dub got unhurriedly to his feet, walked over to the cowboys wrestling on the ground, grabbed both of them by the hair, and lifted them off the ground. He wouldn’t put them down until they both promised to be good.

  Finally, Goodnight knew something reallyhad to be done when he started dreaming about beans every night. He normally considered beans the bane of the cowboy’s existence. Now he missed them, longed for them, had visions of them. It was time to go get some supplies. High time.

  Goodnight took Too Short, Suckerod, and Coffee with him. The cook drove the chuck wagon, which would be used to haul the provisions back to the Home Ranch. They headed north toward Tascosa, a brand-new town, which was a little over 150 miles away. Goodnight led them up yet another Comanche trail that climbed the steep red walls. Zigzagging slowly, they climbed out of the sheltered canyon, bound for the harsh plains. Heaven and hell had somehow gotten mixed up, turned upside down: for you descended into this cattleman’s paradise, but you climbed up to the constant winds and baking sun of Hades. Goodnight thought: How about that?

  The hardest part was getting the damn chuck wagon from heaven up to hell. Goodnight had picked a trail that wasn’t q
uite as steep this time, and the wagon was empty, so they didn’t have to take it apart. But it kept getting stuck. Goodnight, Too Short, and Suckerod all had to get down off their horses and push. Their boots slipped and skidded on the scree. Sometimes it seemed that the wagon was going to run away backward, dragging the poor mules behind it, and running over the cowboys. They wedged rocks behind the wheels to try to prevent such a calamity. And then they pushed harder.

  When all that work finally got them up on top, Goodnight wondered why anybody would go to so much trouble to reach such a depressing panorama. The land was as flat as a flapjack and about the same color. The sun was doing its best to melt the riders as if they were pats of butter. Goodnight remembered how much he liked flapjacks, how much he missed them, how much he would love to bite into a stack of them right now, even the way Coffee made them. He dreamed his dream of pancakes as he rode wearily across the pancake earth.

  After they had gone fifty yards, they could no longer see any trace of the great red canyon. It disappeared as if it had never existed. Had it been just an illusion? Could it be a hole in the mind rather than a hole in the earth?

  On all sides, Goodnight saw nothing but the bleak Staked Plain, what the Mexicans called the Llano Estacado. Some said the name was supposed to refer to stakes placed across the featureless face of the plain to mark a trail. Others said the markers weren’t stakes but rather piles of rocks arranged to show the way. Which made more sense because there wasn’t any wood to make stakes out of on this treeless tabletop. Who left these markers? Some said it was Old Coronado playing Hansel and Gretel, but his stakes—or piles of rocks—were long gone by now. There wasn’t anything at all to navigate by except, of course, the punishing sun.

  When the lazy sun finally began to descend and shadows stretched out forever on the tableland, Goodnight called a halt. There was no obvious place to make camp because one corner of the table was no more inviting than another part. So Goodnight did what he knew a leader had to do: he made an arbitrary decision, but he did it convincingly, so it didn’t seem arbitrary. He wondered if he might actually be learning to lead men.

  There was no wood to burn. They picked up dried buffalo chips to make their campfire. They all chewed on dried bear meat. Then they rolled up in their smelly saddle blankets and went to sleep.

  7

  On the third day, Jimmy Goodnight heard Tascosa before he saw it. The sound of gunfire carried a long way in the dry air across the flatland. There were no mountains or trees to absorb it. Goodnight wondered if the town could be under attack by the Human Beings. If so, he wasn’t sure whose side he would be on. And so he hoped for some other sort of trouble.

  Goodnight urged his horse to go faster and the others followed his lead. Even the chuck wagon’s wheels turned over a little more rapidly, but the animals weren’t yet running full tilt. The town was still invisible, but the shooting grew louder.

  When the roofs of Tascosa finally rose up over the flat horizon like the sails of advancing ships, Jimmy Goodnight spurred his horse into a gallop. Suckerod and Too Short stayed right behind him. Coffee and the chuck wagon couldn’t keep up. Goodnight looked but couldn’t see any Humans harassing the town. He was thankful. But if not the Humans, then who? Then what? Then why? Reaching down to the rifle scabbard that was tied to his saddle, he felt not the stock of a long gun but the head of a single-bladed ax. Now he began to wonder if he had made the right choice, bringing along his lucky blade instead of firepower. Well, it was too late to change his mind now.

  Goodnight pulled back slightly on the reins and slowed Mister Goddog. He had been in a hurry to find out what was wrong, but now he didn’t want to gallop blindly into trouble. Slowing to a walk, he drew his revolver from the holster buckled around his waist. Glancing to his left and right, having to turn his head farther one way than the other, he saw that both of his men had their rifles out now, carrying them across the pommels of their saddles. He noticed that Tascosa seemed to be constructed mainly of adobe, which made sense on a treeless plain where lumber was even scarcer than tobacco.

  Leading the way, Goodnight advanced on Main Street at a slight angle, so he couldn’t see down it. But he didn’t really mind because whoever was shooting couldn’t see him either. He cautiously approached the mud-brick blacksmith shop, which stood at the end of Main Street. When he finally reached it, he dismounted quietly and peeked around the corner.

  Goodnight saw a tree stump in the foreground and in the background somebody getting hanged. He blinked his good eye anxiously, trying to see. The hanged man began to look like a hanged woman. Goodnight blinked again and refocused. She was a woman all right. She had on a light grey dress that blew in the gusting wind. She was hanging from a pole that extended from the second floor of an adobe hotel. It was probably a fence post that somebody had carried upstairs and poked through a second-floor window. It looked like a fishing pole with the woman dangling at the end of the line like a caught bigmouthed bass. And she was flopping like a fish. She was surrounded by cowboys who were laughing and whooping and shooting in the air. Goodnight felt his face heating up as he got angrier.

  Then he noticed something strange about this hanging. The poor woman, whose feet were well off the ground, had both her hands up in the air, well over her head. She looked as if some robber had pulled a gun on her and ordered, “Hands up!” Goodnight stared harder.

  “What’s goin’ on?” asked Suckerod, who had come up behind.

  “Looks like they’re hangin’ some ol’ gal,” Goodnight said. “She’s kickin’ but won’t die.”

  “Less see,” said Too Short, who had also arrived.

  He moved around Goodnight so he could take a look. Then he started shaking his head.

  “What is it?” asked Goodnight, the one-eyed man.

  “They’re hanging her by her thumbs,” Too Short said.

  “No.” Goodnight’s face got hotter. “Who are they?”

  “Dunno,” said Too Short. “Could be the boys from Robbers’ Roost. They say they’re partial to havin’ a good time.”

  Goodnight had heard a lot of stories about a place called Robbers’ Roost that was located somewhere on the Canadian River, which ran parallel to the red canyon. They said it was ruled by an outlaw named Jack Gudanuf—of all things—who was rumored to have an extensive ear collection. He was supposed to be a tall, thin man with long blond hair who didn’t look like a robber. In fact, he was said to be the bestlooking man in West Texas. Of course, there wasn’t much competition because there weren’t many men, handsome or ugly, in this part of the state. Still, Goodnight felt slightly intimidated by the pretty robber. His hand reached up and touched his patch and then stroked the purple stars of the Big Dipper. He couldn’t help it. Then he scratched his ear while he wondered if that business about a collection could possibly be true. Goodnight told himself that it was time to stop wool-gathering and do something.

  “Let’s mount up,” he said at last. “We’ll ride in bold as brass like we don’t know nothin’s goin’ on. When we see what’s up, we’ll make out like we think it’s great. You know, whoop it up. Shoot in the air. And then git the drop on ’em. Leastwise try to. Okay?”

  The other two nodded.

  “I reckon we better play like we’re drunk,” Goodnight added. “Anybody know any good drinkin’ songs?”

  The other two looked puzzled, trying to think.

  “All I know’s cow songs,” said Suckerod, his hands shaking.

  “I think I can recollect some church songs,” said Too Short.

  “Bless you,” Goodnight said with a grin, “but that ain’t just the attitude we’re tryin’ to strike. Cows it is. Less go. Put your guns up for now.”

  Goodnight, Suckerod, and Too Short moved cautiously to their horses and tried not to make any noise as they mounted. In spite of their care, the saddle leathers seemed to make a terrible racket. Once they were all settled, Goodnight nodded and they all rode forward.

  Rounding the corner of
the blacksmith shop, Goodnight was still angry, but he also felt nervous and a little foolish. He knew he wasn’t much good at pretending. He was sure he wouldn’t be able to fool anybody. He was even afraid his own men would break up laughing at him and so give the game away. He took a deep breath between lips forming a counterfeit smile. When he saw the hell-raisers turn and look in his direction, he started swaying drunkenly in his saddle.

  “Come on, Suckerod,” Goodnight whispered, “sing.”

  The cowboy who knew cow songs shook more than ever.

  “Come a tie-yie-yay,” Suckerod sang softly. “Git along little dogies . . .”

  “Louder,” whispered Goodnight.

  “You sing too,” Suckerod whispered back. Then he raised his voice and sang: “Come a tie-yie-yay, git along little dogies, for it’s your misfortune and none a my own . . .”

  “Come a tie-yie-yie,” Goodnight sang drunkenly, “giddiyup li’l’ dogies, fur iss yo’ mishfor—mishfor—bad luck and none a my own . . .”

  Too Short was moving his lips, but no noise seemed to come out.

  “Come a tie-yie-yay,” Suckerod sang again.

  “Sing the next verse,” sang Goodnight.

  “Thass all I know,” sang Suckerod. “Git along little dogies. Sing, Too Short. For it’s your misfortune . . .”

  Too Short moved his lips faster, but still no music came out.

  “Sing!” Goodnight ordered.

  “Just give me that ol’ time religion,” Too Short sang. “Iss good enough for me . . .”

  “Come a tie-yie-yay,” sang Suckerod.

  “Come a tie-yie-yie,” sang Goodnight and then hiccupped loudly.

  While he was playacting, he watched the outlaws talking among themselves. They were obviously trying to decide what to make of the newcomers.

  “Come a tie-yie . . . old time religion . . . your misfortune and none a my own . . . good enough for me . . .”