Говард Уолдроп - Them Bones

She turned back inside the tent, looking past the sleeping black men.

‘There was some kind of settlement here,’ she said.

She looked wildly around.

Bob Basket was gone, only a wet place on the ground cloth showing where he had sat.

Smith’s Diary

I went to see Kilroy.

I told him the brass told us to come up with a real longterm plan. Not like the seventy-year plan we’d started with, the one more than a hundred people had worked on.

‘Great,’ he said, ‘just great. How long?’

‘At least five hundred years,’ I said.

‘I’m not going to be around that long, and neither will any of us.’

‘That’s just the kind of plan they want, Specialist,’ I said. ‘How do we go about setting up anything that’ll take half a millennium? What are we supposed to do, kidnap Indian kids, brainwash ’em, set up an operation that’ll elect Stevenson in ’52 rather than Eisenhower? Or what?’

‘If I’m supposed to figure all this out,’ said Kilroy, ‘why am I just a grunt? I thought only officers had that much foresight.

‘It’s not just for them,’ I said. ‘It’s for me too.’

‘It’s you?’ he asked. ‘You want me to come up with a five-hundred-year plan for you? While I pull bunker guard and shitburning detail? For your amusement, or what? ’

‘To see if there’s any reason for keeping up this whole charade,’ I said.

He put down the bottle of Indian honey wine he’d been drinking from. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Free will versus determination? That kind of stuff?’

‘It’s not all of us, and everybody, anymore.’ I tried to make myself clear. ‘It’s just every one of us, alone. By ourselves. If there’s a plan, anything, it’ll be easier for all of us. Don’t you see?’

‘Yes. First thing is, we’ll have to make lots of babies. I’m ready!’

‘That’s pretty stupid, Kilroy,’ I said.

‘Probably. But for an officer, ma’am, you’ve got great legs.’

‘Uh,’ I said.

‘I’ll get on it,’ he said. ‘God knows I’ll have to think about this.’

I started to go. Then I said, ‘Thank you.’

‘That’s what I’m here for,’ he said. And made a fake smile. Then he added, ‘You’re the only one who really cares about any of this. Not just the mission but what happens to us.’

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘Get some sleep.’ Then I left.

The canoes came across the River, row on row. They were full of guys dressed in their best feathers, their brightest jewelry, their gaudiest clothes.

They carried their best weapons, too. Spears, atlatls, bows, axes, clubs, shields, reed and leather armor, and knives. They could have wrecked any bar in Hong Kong.

But we were going out to meet the Huastecas for a ritual battle, a flower-fight they called it, and the way it was explained to me, the idea was to capture as many of the other guys as you could, not to kill them.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Took, as we watched the dugouts slide up the shore and the warriors jump out, whooping and hollering. ‘When you see some of our people knock one of the Huastecas down, jump on him a few times. Everybody will think you’re a fine fellow.’

‘What’s the purpose?’ I asked.

Took looked at me. ‘Well, you can’t have wars with your own people, can you?’

‘What happens to the ones who are captured?’

‘Ours, or theirs?’

‘Uh, theirs.’

‘Oh, they ransom them, usually. Mostly for pretty stuff. Clothes, ornaments. The Huastecas make nice rings and things.’

‘What about ours?’

‘Well, we usually try to ransom them, and they do send some of them back, but not all.’

‘What happens to the ones they don’t send back?’

‘I guess they eat them,’ said Took.

We fanned out, maybe two thousand of us in all, as agreed. I knew what Custer must have felt like on that bluff over the Little Big Horn, only now I was part of it. We were a day out of the village, heading west. We skirted the edge of some bayous. We headed through open rolling grasslands toward the setting sun.

At one bayou, Sun Man’s people, Took, and I broke away from the rest of the main group. We walked through water up to our knees, under cypresses and Spanish moss (I’ve got to think of another name for it) until we reached an opening in the waterway.

The trees here grow in a circle maybe two hundred meters across. All except for one. It was the biggest cypress I’d ever seen in my life, maybe eighty meters tall, five hundred or a thousand years old, maybe older. It was nothing but a trunk, except for one limb that started halfway up. The top of the tree was missing.

I noticed then that the Dreaming Killer and his Buzzard Cult people weren’t with us. I asked Took.

‘Religious differences,’ he said.

Sun Man raised his arms and yelled three times, like he does every morning. I caught enough of his chant to know that he was calling on the Big Woodpecker. Then we marched back out of the swamps and rejoined the holiday crowd heading for the battle site.

‘That was the tree in which the Great Woodpecker sometimes sits,’ said Took.

‘Oh?’

‘One of our great-great-grandfathers accidentally saw it one evening. He went blind, of course.’

‘Of course. Did he say how big it was?’

‘He said that before he went blind, he saw that it sat on the limb, and the top of its head was higher than the top of the tree trunk.’

‘That’s awfully big,’ I said. I had been expecting something maybe two meters tall.

‘Sure is,’ said Took-His-Time. He broke into some kind of song. Others took it up, including the Buzzard Cult people.

We watched their fires, and we knew they were watching ours. There was an old flood plain between two small bluffs about half a kilometer apart. We were on one, and the Huastecas were on the other. The battle would take place on the flat place between us tomorrow.

‘Better get some sleep,’ said Took, who had spread his skins out beside mine. We were eating a supper of jerky and ground cornmeal with a few walnuts mixed in. Took passed the waterskin over.

‘It could take all day, what with breaks for lunch and stuff,’ he said.

‘Pretty civilized.’

‘You won’t think so if you get caught, or off by yourself, which is the same thing,’ he said. ‘Stick close to a mob. If you get caught, they’ll probably come get you. Don’t let them cover your mouth, whatever you do. Keep yelling.’

‘Thanks. What really happens?’

‘Well, we sort of run together in a big bunch and hit each other, and drag off captives, then eat, then do it some more, and about two hours from sunset we all go home, and three days later we ransom, but that’s only chief man business. Our part will be over. If this were a real battle, we’d take heads instead of captives.’

I watched the bright stars overhead through the glow of the fires. It was early spring, and still cool.

I know it was just me, but I had trouble sleeping. Took called out in a dream. He woke up and looked at me.

‘My spirit is troubled,’ he said. He closed his eyes and was asleep again immediately.

‘Yee! Yee! Yee!’ yelled Sun Man, facing east. Up and down our bluff, other Sun Men were doing the same thing.