News of the World: A Novel (13 page)

With the weight of the dimes and the powder charge the shotgun had just become something like a small cannon. Not only that but heavy things flew far and fast and so it might give him a range of close to two hundred yards.

He couldn’t stop laughing. By God, by God, he said. They had a chance to get out of this. Everything had changed now. Good girl, Johanna, good girl. My dear little warrior.

He did not notice that he stank of cordite and that Johanna’s hands were white with flour and that both of them were coated with the red dirt of the Brazos country. The Captain found that suddenly he was no longer tired. She smiled back at him with her bright child’s teeth and then the Captain held up one hand.
Wait.
She nodded.

First they had some ruses and deceptions to accomplish. He took up one of the dove-shot shells and loaded the old shotgun. As he laid the barrel into the notch he saw her loading yet more dimes into shells, ramming in the wads with a stick, pouring out powder from the old spring-loaded charger, ramming another wad and finally twisting each hull firmly shut.

He fired down the ravine and heard the light beads of Number Seven Dove tinkle harmlessly on the stone.

Far below, Almay’s laugh rang out. He called, That all you got?

Come closer and you’ll find out, you son of a bitch, the Captain called back.

I’m scared. You’re shooting cake decorations or something at me, Almay shouted in reply.

Well come on, then, said the Captain.

He wondered where the Caddos were. Nursing their wounds, hopefully, or better yet, busy bleeding to death. He
loaded another Number Seven and fired. It sprayed out its tiny beads into the air as if it had sneezed poppy seeds. He glanced at Johanna. She was busy stacking more dimes into hulls.

Listen to me, said Almay. He was still hidden behind one of the stone buttresses.

I don’t seem to have a choice, called the Captain.

You should be good at a bargain. This ain’t your first rodeo, here.

They don’t need to make a deal. He thinks everything is on his side. What he wants is to kill me and take the girl and the horses. They’ll burn the wagon. It’s too recognizable.
Curative Waters.
He wants to get close enough to kill me without hitting the girl. He’s not sure of his aim. He’s shooting uphill. Always difficult.

He worked the bolt and the old hull jumped out smoking and she grabbed it. Now he slipped one of her dime shells into the breech. The weight of it should give him a good hundred and seventy, hundred and eighty yards if not more. He laid the barrel into the notch.

What’s your deal? he called.

Reasonable! I can be reasonable.

Come up, we’ll talk.

The blond man held his hat out from the edge of the buttress. There was a hole in it. Captain, he said. You was trying to hit me in the head, here. That’s serious malicious intent. We have some serious talking to do.

So?

Listen to me, said Almay.

You already said that. Stop repeating yourself.

Now, let’s make some kind of deal here.

Why was he delaying? The Captain knew the only reason was to keep him talking while the Caddos crept up. Far to his left a small trickle of sand and rocks spilled down the ravine.

Well speak up, then, said the Captain. Stop your goddamn dithering. I hate dithering.

By now Almay knew the range of the shotgun and its dove shot. He walked confidently out from behind his buttress of stone. He also thought the Captain was out of revolver ammunition. Clearly he was not shooting it and had reverted, in his desperation, to the shotgun and its pepper-light loads. Almay advanced up the ravine. Here and there the water of Carlyle Springs had worn the red sandstone layers down to the strata below, hard and marblelike. White and pure and level. They were like irregular steps going down the ravine, carved through the eons. Since Noah, perhaps. Almay carried his hat in one hand and took long steps to reach from one plate to the next in his knee-high boots. His hair was dark with sweat. They had ridden hard to catch up.

I tell you what, Almay called. You put down that shotgun and I’ll make sure my men empty their magazines and we can have a conversation.

Two hundred yards, then a little closer.
Come on, come on.

Certainly. I’m putting it down as we speak.

The Captain aimed very carefully. He was not sure what the coins would do, or the extra-heavy powder charge. So he aimed for the V of Almay’s open shirt collar and pulled the trigger.

The dimes roared out of the muzzle at six hundred feet per second with a muzzle blast two feet long. The gunsmoke expanded in a great thick cloud and the stock slammed back into
the Captain’s shoulder almost hard enough to dislocate it. He struck Almay in the forehead with a load of U.S. mint ten-cent pieces. As the coins flew out of the paper tube they turned on edge so that when they hit Almay’s forehead it looked as if his head had been suddenly printed with hyphens. The hyphens all began to spout blood. Almay fell backward, his head downhill. All the Captain could see was his boot soles.

He jerked off his hat and shoved it between the butt of the stock and his shoulder. Then without turning his head he held out his hand and a dime-loaded shotgun shell was slapped into it, he shoved it in, shot the bolt home, brought the sights to bear on the scrambling Caddos. Another great bellow like a cannon and silver coins hissed through the air faster than sight and they sparkled and ricocheted all down the ravine. The roar of the overloaded twenty-gauge sounded like a grenade had gone off. Ten-cent pieces slammed edge-on into a wounded Caddo’s backside. A shower of bright flying money tore through the trees lower down and clipped branches and leaves of the live oak, spanged off stone, chipped the skull crown of the Caddo in the rear so that he instinctively turned around to fight and the Captain unloaded on him again. Silver like tearing sequins sliced sideways through their blousy shirtsleeves and turned their hats into colanders.

By God, I believe that was a good two hundred and fifty yards, the Captain said.

Finally he leaned back against his red stone barbican. His nerves were glowing like fuses and he was not tired anymore.
I got them. I did it. We did it.

She held up another shell, laughing and smiling.

No, my dear. He was sucking air. His eyebrow still hurt. We need the money to buy supplies.

He lay back against the rock breathing slowly. Johanna jumped to her feet, standing straight as a willow wand. She lifted her face to the sun and began to chant in a high, tight voice. Her taffy hair flew in thick strands, powdered with flour, and she took up the butcher knife and held the blade above her head and began to sing.
Hey hey Chal an aun!
Their enemies had run before them. They had fled in terror, they were faint of heart, their hands were without strength,
Hey hey hey! My enemies have been sent to the otherworld, they have been sent to the place that is dark blue, where there is no water, hey hey hey! Coi-guu Khoe-duuey!

We are hard and strong, the Kiowa!

Far below the Caddos heard the Kiowa triumph chant, the scalping chant, and when they struck the bottom of the ravine where it bled out into the Brazos they did not even stop to fill their canteens.

Then she climbed over the lip of rock with her skirts and petticoats wadded into Turkish pantaloons and the butcher knife held high. She was halfway down before the Captain came after her and got hold of her skirt.

She had been on her way to scalp Almay.

No, my dear, we don’t . . . it’s not done, he said.

Haain-a?

No. Absolutely not. No. No scalping. He lifted her up and swung her up over the ledges of stone and then followed. He said, It is considered very impolite.

THIRTEEN

H
E REHARNESSED AND
took up all his small possessions from the tailgate, slammed it shut. He had to find a place to cross the Brazos soon. Going back downhill the Captain rode the brake. The shafts lunged up around Fancy’s shoulders on the steep grade and the brake chocks screamed on the axles. All the stuff in the wagon bed ended up in a heap against the back of the driver’s seat with Johanna tossed among the tools and food and blankets, holding the revolver. He had unloaded it but she seemed happier with it in her hands. They were frayed and dirty. They both looked like they had been dragged through a knothole. As the wagon plunged downhill among the red rock and stiff brush he prayed they would not break a tie-rod and that the cracked iron tire would hold.

They made it to the bottom and the road in one piece with all possessions and horses still in hand.

The Captain’s nerves were humming like telegraph wires in a wind and he knew in a little while he would be close to collapse. He searched every copse of live oaks and when they reached the Brazos, every shadow in the pecan flats. The road
ran along the north side of the river, a shy and obsequious road that dodged every bank and lift and wound through the pecan trees and never insisted on its own way. He searched out every road bank ahead of him as they went. He was ready to shoot somebody else if need be. He must slow down. For Johanna, he needed to quiet himself; he must appear calm and assured. The Caddos would bury Almay under a pile of rocks and quietly slip back into Oklahoma. Someday somebody would find the bones and wonder whose they were. Almay would run his child prostitution ring no more, his brains blown out by the coin of the realm,
hey hey hey.
The Captain’s heart finally calmed.

That night he dusted his cut forehead with gray wound powder, and then slept like a dead man without his usual war nightmares that should have been brought about by the fight, but somehow they passed him by. Perhaps they sought out someone else. Perhaps he was not on their map this night.

He woke up to a clean and tidy camp under the pecan trees that stood high and airy above them. He heard the noise of a little stream nearby running into the Brazos and the hush, hush sound of small new pecan leaves in the breeze. He heard Johanna crying out, Eat! Now you eat! And the mare’s bell ringing as the horses grazed. He took the plate from her and ate carefully. The blue smoke from the little stovepipe lay low and drifted. They were all right, he and the girl were alive. They were having a calm breakfast among the pecan trees, new leaves like green dots with their shadows making slow polkas back and forth over them and the
Curative Waters
golden letters.

He pressed one hand to his right eyebrow. The cut was a little swollen but all right. He could for a brief time work as hard
as a younger man but it always took much longer to recover. He must recover. They had far to go.

The horses needed rest and care as much as he did. He would have to teach this to Johanna. The Plains Indians did not expend much care on their horses. They rode them hard and as a last resort ate them. He went down Fancy and Pasha’s legs to check for swelling but they were all right. They had last been shod up in Bowie but before long they would need new ones. He straightened up again with some effort; he could almost hear the jointed sound as one vertebrae settled on another.

He sat on his carpetbag and leaned against a wheel. His mind kept going back to the fight and to put it aside he watched Pasha graze and drank black coffee and smoked his pipe. Johanna played in the stream like a six-year-old. She turned over rocks and sang and splashed. To comfort himself and slow down his mind he thought of his time as a courier, a runner, and Maria Luisa and his daughters. Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.

He was not really rested but well enough. They went on.

THE NEXT DAY
at noon they came to a place called the Brazos ferry. The Brazos unwound slow green coils and smoke from slash fires lay low and drifted at the height of a man’s head. There was no ferry. He could see the ferry landing on the other side, downstream about a hundred yards where the current would
push them. The landing looked good; it looked like a hard bottom. The river was up so things might have changed. Loads of sand and silt could have been laid over the landing, big tumbling drowned trees could be below the surface of the river turning like the fabled octopus with grasping arms.

Once again they had to make a crossing on their own and once again he loosed Pasha and the little mare Fancy plunged in. She fought across the current, they drifted down, Johanna clutched up her skirts and prepared to jump but they made it.

On the far side they were on the Lampasas Road and would miss Meridian altogether. That was all right. They would soon come to Durand which was larger and had more people, all of them with money in their pockets he sincerely hoped.

A brief rain; again it was a wet world where each leaf of the live oak, clinging to the twigs throughout the winter, held a drop at its tip. The live oaks never lost their leaves in the winter; he had seen them standing green in a snowfall.

Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.

He said, Tree. He took off his old broad-brimmed field hat and ran his hand through his hair, which was as fine as cobweb and as white. Put the hat back on.

Yes, tlee, tlee.

He pointed out: Pine. Oak. Cedar. First the general class and then the specific.

Yes, Kep-den Kidd.

As they drove, he pointed back to Pasha, to his nose, to the bacon. She seemed to have had some acquaintance with the English language before. Maybe her memory just needed a jog. She said, Hoas, nos-ah, bekkin. Then he rose to his feet. Stend up, she said. He sat down. Sit don.
Kontah,
sit don.