Говард Уолдроп - Them Bones

‘I don’t know whether he did or not, but he let you do it,’ said Took. Then he grimaced in pain.

‘As soon as we get past the Huastecas, I’ll give you something for the pain. It’ll make you feel like you’re flying. But if I give it to you now, you’ll be unconscious for a day. I can carry you when we’re past them, but not while they’re around.’

‘We’ll put out at nightfall,’ said Took-His-Time. ‘Go north, then east. When we get to the magnolias, we have to leave the canoe and go overland again. We should pass the last Meshicas before midnight.’

He lay back in the boat, nodding, jerking awake, sleeping fitfully. The sun crawled like a bright slug across the sky.

Feet pounded by on the bank once. The alligator came back, smelled us, and crashed back out of his run.

The sun dropped, then it was night.

We pushed the canoe back out into the water and set off through the magnolia-scented night.

‘Home is that way,’ said Took, pointing. I couldn’t see where he meant. ‘We’ll join the path we followed to go to the Flower War last month, remember?’

‘How far?’

‘All night. Then home.’

I turned and hugged him, careful of his shoulder. We were using rags ripped from my shirt to stop the bleeding now.

‘We’re going to make it,’ I said. ‘I can feel it.’

‘The night is long, Yaz,’ he said.

Right on cue an arrow whizzed by, then the darkness was full of Huastec whoops and hollers.

There were five or six of them and I got them with my last fragmentation grenade. I didn’t kill them all, just put them out of commission. That woke up everybody, though. The night filled with sounds after the echo of the explosion died.

‘Which way are we going?’ I asked Took. I’d pushed him down into the boat, and his shoulder was bleeding again.

‘That way.’ He pointed. The wind was blowing about thirty degrees off that direction from our backs, gusting.

‘They’ll be between us and home, won’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then let’s give them something to worry about besides us. Stay down.’

I took out my last grenade, a Wooly Pete. I waded to shore, walked a few meters into the open space ahead. I went to a position about twenty meters from where the grass and underbrush were thickest. I pulled the pin and threw the white phosphorus grenade that way, ran ten meters and jumped behind a tree.

WP grenades are so heavy you can only throw them twenty meters but they have a splash radius of thirty.

A firestorm bloomed on the night. I saw the bones of my hand through the skin, it was so bright. I hoped Huastecas for kilometers around had been looking right at it; they’d be blind till morning.

The fire climbed up trees, over grass, along the ground in a great red-orange and white wall. In no time it was a hundred meters wide and growing, pushed by the churning wind.

‘Don’t mess with the Woodpecker God,’ I said to myself.

‘Wow!’ said Took, who was up and watching from the canoe. The curtain of flames marched off toward the east, crowning trees, lapping at their trunks.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

We found the trail at the same time the Huastecas found us.

They were to our left, the fire was to the right in a blazing arc a couple of kilometers long. The air was filled with escaping birds. The woods glinted with animal eyes, stopping and bounding away.

The Huastecas yelled. We saw them by the light of the flames. They saw us the same way. There were a dozen of them half a kilometer away.

‘Can you breathe smoke?’ I asked Took-His-Time.

‘Maybe.’

We ran for the fire, met deer coming out the other way. Before we even got close, smoke and hot air seared our lungs. An arrow flew by, its feathers bursting into flames as it ricocheted from a burning limb.

‘They won’t follow us in here,’ I said.

Took slowed, jumped some embers, slipped, fell into a smoking bush. The air was filled with cinders; burning leaves coaled into my cheeks as I bent over him.

Now there was froth on the blood from his wound. I took out the morphine injector, put it into his arm, and punched.

He went to sleep.

I pushed a few more strips of cloth into the wound, picked him up and put him over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I walked with my burden through the ragged towers of flame that closed us in on every side.

Trees groaned and fell, spouting sparks, throwing fiery branches onto others. A smoking owl flew by. A raccoon ran into a hedge of fire. Smoke curled up from underfoot.

The world was orange, red, smoky. Feathers on the woodpecker costume began to singe and curl. I stepped on something live; I think it bit me. I staggered into cul-de-sacs of heat and fire, and back out again.

I walked until the bottom of the costume floated up around my waist.

I was surprised to find myself in water.

I carried Took for a long, long time. I was numb now, my lungs were burned, my legs had lost all feeling. I couldn’t feel anything under them either. I slogged on through the water.

All the animals were there. Every bit of high ground was filled with eyes reflecting the fires, from the ground up to the tops of small trees.

Snakes and alligators swam by in the red-gold glare, bumping into my legs, backing off and going around. Something huge blotted out the light from the fire on one side, then was gone before I could see what it was.

The deeper I went into the swamp, the stranger it became. The glow was from both sides now. The fire had ringed or crossed the bayou somehow. Mist sprang up. I could no longer see the water, just a moving curtain two meters high in front of me. Overhead, the stars were obscured by roiling patches of smoke.

It got cold in spite of the fire. My teeth began to chatter. I was so tired I was trying to nod off as I walked. Things flitted in and out of my vision. I would jerk fully awake and they would be gone.

There was a third smudge of light ahead; when the mists cleared for a few seconds I could see a blood-red moon with a bite out of it hanging in the east, like a half-closed rabbit’s eye.

I was carrying Took now between cypress knees and stumps, thick and close-growing. The mists closed in again. I knew I was okay as I walked toward the glow that was the moonrise.

I entered shallower water. Took was an iron weight across my back. I moved him, shifting him only a few centimeters. I was too tired to put him down and try again.

‘Isn’t he heavy?’ asked a voice, long and low and booming through the mists.

‘He’s not heavy,’ I said, ‘he’s my brother.’

The moon was gone. There was a shadow before me on the water, black and long.

I looked up. A gigantic cypress tree stood before me. It had a limb halfway up that grew straight out from the trunk.

I looked down again, quick as I could. There was something on the limb, something half as big as the tree, something that blotted out the moonlight and threw the shadow over me and half the clearing.

‘Who are you to wear the raiment of a god?’ asked the voice. ‘You do not believe!’

My mouth wouldn’t work.

‘WHO ARE YOU?’ it asked again. The long crested shadow before me turned, as if its great eye were scrutinizing me.

‘I believe now,’ I said. ‘I believe in this !’

‘You have burned my woods!’ it said, its voice edging upward. ‘The lightning can burn my woods. Whole nations of men can burn my woods. One man cannot burn my forests!’

The shadow moved menacingly. I jumped backwards. Took whimpered.

‘No more,’ I said. ‘Never again.’

The shadow moved left and right as if surveying the damage all around.