Говард Уолдроп: Them Bones

The horse whinnied.

I turned.

They stood watching me: Larry, Curly, and Moe.

Except that these three were nearly naked. They wore breechcloths. They had bows, arrows, spears and clubs. They had feathers in their hair and pearls around their necks.

My heart stopped.

‘Nah Sue Day Ho,’ said Moe.

He didn’t really look much like Moe, except that his hair hung in bangs on the front and he had a small pot belly and bandy legs. Larry didn’t look much like Larry, except that his hair was pulled up into two knots, one over each ear, his nose was large and he was the skinniest of the three.

Curly looked just like Curly. He was stout, built like a gorilla, and his head was shaved. He was tattooed all over – round circles, bands of blue and green. A swastika curved over his navel.

All three wore ornaments the size of teacups in their earlobes.

‘Nah Sue Day Ho,’ Moe repeated.

My first impression was going away. There were three Amerinds here, and they were armed. Each had a couple of rabbits and some squirrels tied to their loincloths with rawhide thongs.

‘Nah Sue Day Ho,’ Moe said. I didn’t know if it were a question, a greeting, a warning. Their faces were impassive. A very unfunny Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr Howard.

‘Hello,’ I said and held up my right hand in greeting, palm out. That was supposed to be universal. As I did so I slid up out of the water and stood, my left hand finding the buttplate of the carbine.

As I stood, their eyes widened a little and they looked at my crotch. I resisted the temptation to look down. It was probably an old trick.

‘Hello,’ I said again, then ‘Friend.’ I didn’t know whether I wanted to be friends with them or not. I just didn’t want a fight. I was ashamed of myself for letting them walk right up on me.

‘Cue Way No Hay?’ asked Moe. His eyes went to my crotch again, then back to my face. ‘Ho Gway din Now.’

‘ Amigos! ’ I said. ‘ Como se llama? ’

‘Cue Way Ho Nay?’ Moe asked, his face twisting. Curly held a big war club with a ball and a single big spike on the end of it. I’d seen clubs like that in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton.

The horse made another rude noise. The three jumped, then looked over at it. I felt better about myself then. It must have been behind the bushes when they came up, and they hadn’t seen it. Their eyes really got wide then. They turned to face it. They made noises among themselves.

I pulled the carbine up with my left hand (I’m a lefty) while keeping my right hand up and open.

‘Bu Show Mo Toy?’ asked Moe.

‘Condo Ku Moy no-hat?’ asked Curly.

‘Moy Doe!’ said Larry, hefting his spear and looking toward the horse.

The horse stamped turf into the air. It was upset.

‘Cue Way No Hay?’ asked Moe again. ‘Cue-Way-No-Hay?’ he asked slowly, as if repeating it for a child.

Larry was the one I was worried about. He was going to do something to the horse soon. I was afraid he was going to spear it.

‘ Amigos ,’ I said. ‘Friends. Hello.’ My mind wasn’t working at all.

Curly moved back from the horse. He said something to Moe.

I had to do something.

I fired the carbine once, into the air.

I don’t know what reaction I expected: fear, wonderment, anger. It wasn’t what I got.

‘Ah Muy nu-ho,’ said Moe, shrugging his shoulders. He made a deprecatory gesture with his hands, as if giving up on me.

The horse tried to pull away from the tree I’d tied it to. The eyes of the three rolled a little. Who was afraid of a horse but not a gun?

I looked toward the horse.

When I turned back, the men were gone. One of the nearby bushes still swayed a little where they had brushed it on their way past.

‘Hey, wait!’ I yelled.

My hand started to shake. I had been holding it up in the air the whole time.

I followed their tracks. They joined others on a footpath. I rode slowly. I don’t think I really wanted to catch up with them. It was late afternoon. I neared the Mississippi.

I saw the village long before I got near it. The trees thinned out. Then there was a cleared area, which had been slashed-and-burned, half a kilometer across. Beyond that were the fields, stretching a kilometer in three directions. Their village lay beyond the fields.

It was palisaded, surrounded by an earthen embankment higher than the surrounding fields. The Mississippi River lay back of it. I could see two high places within the town walls – one had a building atop it, and there were statues of some kind on the roof. I counted housetops, rounded, mud-covered things. There were at least fifty inside the part of the walls I could see.

At the near edge of the fields were two huge mounds of dirt. Ten meters high, twenty in diameter. They were scraped bare and had nothing growing on them.

The fields were full of various kinds of beans, squash, pumpkins, and gourds. It was late in the season. Tendrils of climbing beans hung in the air on sunbleached cane poles. Row on row of short cornstalks with small ears on them grew as far as I could see to the right. Their leaves were beginning to curl and turn yellow. It must be September here.

There should have been people in sight, but there was no one. I thought maybe they had all run away. Then I saw that the walls, which must have ramparts inside, bristled with spears. At the log notches, more than two hundred people watched me, unmoving.

Then I saw the fields weren’t entirely deserted. Someone sat on a stump, working at something in his hand. Whittling, maybe. The stump was next to the path through the fields, surrounded by pepper plants.

I rode within thirty meters of him, then dismounted and tied the horse to another stump. I eased the safety off the carbine and kept an eye on the village. They just stared back, unmoving.

I walked toward the man, held up my hand. Wind rustled through the corn. He stopped what he was doing. He had some kind of stone in his hand and was carving on it with a piece of metal.

He was unarmed. He had on a red-and-white-striped loincloth and wore a pair of moccasins. His hair was black, pulled back in two braids, and had a single feather in it. He had one small pearl in his left ear. He was much more confidence-inspiring than the three who had surprised me at the spring.

I stopped. He regarded me calmly. His skin was an even copper color, like an old penny. He had no tattoos.

His eyes went to the horse tethered far away. Then he studied me, my carbine, my clothes.

My arm was still up in greeting.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘ Amigo . Friend.’

‘Hello,’ he said, in Greek.

DA Form 11432Z 01 Oct 2002

Comp 147TOE 148

Pres for duty

146

Missing, line of duty

1 For: S. Spaulding

Col, Inf.

Total: 147

Commanding Barnes, Bonnie

Cpt ADC

Adjutant

Smith’s Diary

Oct 4

It took two and a half days for us all to come through, though we started at thirty-second intervals. I came through in the middle of the first night.

Forty-five minutes later Sgt. Croft came out of the portal behind me.

And so on through the night, the next day and night, and early into the second morning.

One hundred and forty-six of us.

There is still no sign of Leake, or of what happened to him. Dr. Heidegger thought the jump-reading on the instruments just before Leake went through may have something to do with it. The point man could be back where we started from, a few days before or after where we started from, Up There.