James Burke - Two for Texas

“He sleep with bad women tonight. He not come here.”

Jack Tyler’s fat Mexican woman came into the barn with an angle lamp and four folded U.S. army blankets. In the yellow flare off the lamp she looked awful. She dropped the blankets on the hay.

“No orinen por aquí,” she said, then walked with her lamp through the stall while the horses knocked their hooves into the wood.

“What did she say?” Son said.

“She not want a squaw man and Indian woman in her barn.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“How you know?” She unfolded one of the army blankets and lay down on the hay. “You think they like me here? How the Americans look at you when you walk out with me?”

“Those are all drunk men. Their heads are full of rut and whiskey. They wasn’t paying no mind to us.”

“Why you keep your hand so tight on pistol, then?”

He felt his face flush in the dark.

“Because I don’t like dealing with a sharper like Jack Tyler,” he said. “I don’t like being in a saloon full of white trash and jenny-barners, either. Last, I put in a good day today and I don’t feel like nobody holding me to the fire before I go to sleep.”

He sat on a quilt and pulled off his boots. The hay sank under his weight, and a pain shot out of his rib cage into his heart that made his mouth go open for breath.

“Stay back,” she said, and pressed her palms against his forehead.

He could smell the animal odor in her clothes again. She pulled his shirt back and touched her fingers along the scabbed wound in his side.

“You start bleed again,” she said. Then she knelt beside him and began tearing away his shirt in strips.

“You crazy Tonkawa woman. That’s the only shirt I got until Tyler gives me one in the morning, and Hugh’s probably already drunk that up by this time.”

“I wash. You wait,” she said.

He watched her walk through the row of stalls, looking for a pail, then find one in a trough and push open the front door against the sky. He heard her release the winch on the well out in the lot and the hollow sound of the bucket hitting the water far below.

She washed his wound while he sat hunched with an army blanket over his shoulders.

“How’d you learn to talk English when you was with them Mexican buffalo hunters all the time?” he said.

“Mexicans not take me from the Tonkawas. Americans did. We were four women and seven children picking berries when they shoot everyone. They not kill me and my sister, but she die later. They take away my name Sana and call me White-Man’s-Woman. Iron Jacket told you I was Tonkawa hand-blower. They not have that in my people. Later the Americans gave me to the Mexican hunters for the magic water and a gun.”

“How’d your sister die?”

“She get the disease that lives in the water where the Comanches stay. It can live inside the Comanches and not hurt them because they are bad people, but it kill other Indians.”

“Why’d you let Iron Jacket tell all them lies about you?”

“You and Hugh not ask me. You just listen to coward Indian.”

“I’m listening now, ain’t I?”

“You got bad feeling inside about Indians.”

“That don’t mean I don’t like none of them.”

“I hear you call them red niggers to Hugh. What they done to you that’s so bad?”

“It don’t make no difference now who done it.”

“What they done?”

“Some drunk Shawnees killed my folks back in Tennessee.”

“Who Shawnee?”

“I told you it don’t make no difference. All them people is rubbed out, anyway. The only thing I got in my mind is getting away from Emile Landry. If Hugh don’t stop getting careless, we’re going to make a mistake and get sent back to the pen. They’ll hang us when they get us back there, too.”

“You strange boy. I never think you kill.”

They heard voices rising in the saloon, then a crashing sound like a table being thrown on its side.

“Damn, I bet Hugh is back with the Harpe gang now,” Son said.

“You not worry about him. He always know what he do.”

“I think I remember one time he didn’t and somebody went upside his head with a stick of firewood.”

“You lie down now. Tomorrow you have new shirt.”

“Tomorrow I’m going to be sobering up Hugh in the trough.”

“He be all right. You lie down.” She pressed him back on the pallet with her fingers. “You good boy. You live too much for so young.”

He closed his eyes momentarily and smelled the hay and the odor of the horses in the stalls. The wind was rattling a piece of loose tack in the loft overhead. When he opened his eyes in the darkness again, he saw Sana lying on her hip next to him with her long hair folded into a curve under the blanket’s edge.

Then between sleep and a dream, just before he was pulled away into the clicking of hailstones against the roof, he felt her lean over him, brush his forehead with her fingertips, and touch his mouth with hers.

It was bright and cold in the morning when Son walked out of the barn with an army blanket wrapped around him, and the hailstones had frozen in the horse lot like pieces of broken glass. Hugh was already up, tying their supplies down on a pack mule. His face was red in the wind, and he wore a flop hat pulled down low on his ears. He picked up a wool-lined canvas coat from the stack of supplies and threw it at Son.

“Put that on before you get the pneumonie,” he said.

“I didn’t reckon you’d be moving around this morning.”

“The whiskey or wine ain’t been made that can give me a hangover, boy.”

“Let me get Sana and let’s move it down the trace.”

“Who?”

“That’s her name.”

Hugh grinned and pulled a leather thong into a tight knot.

“Don’t say what’s going on in that worthless mind of yours,” Son said.

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Don’t walk off just yet. I done some late drinking and talking with Jack, and I think I got a couple of pretty good ideas. You remember what that ferry-tender said about hiding in the army? That ain’t a bad notion. Besides, Jack said Sam Houston’s promising six hundred and forty acres of land to any soldier that’ll see it to the end with him. You was talking about putting it down in one place, and that’s a hell of a lot of land to do it on.”

“It don’t look to me like he’s going to have any land to give out.”

“Well, you take your chances when you play, don’t you? And once we’re in the army, Emile Landry can’t do shit to us.”

“What’s to stop him? Sam Houston don’t represent no real government.”

“You don’t know nothing about soldiering on the losing side. They ain’t going to let nobody take you, because they need your butt and musket there in the trench. It’s the desperate people that win the wars, boy.”

“What about Sana?”

“I got that worked out. Jack says there’s a Tonkawa camp over on the Brazos. We leave her with her people and then head for Bexar or wherever Sam Houston’s at.”

“Maybe she don’t want to go back.”

“Son, stop making it hard every time we got to do something. We can’t wander all over Texas with an Indian woman. Somewhere along the line our luck is going to run out. The Mexicans are going to get us, or Landry is, or maybe we’ll just end up freezing to death on the plains. When you’re in a foul-smelling outhouse, you shit through the hole and get out.”

“You got a coat for her?”

“It’s under them bags of jerky.”

“I reckon I’m the one that tells her, too.”

“That’s up to you. But there ain’t no two ways about it: she’s got a spark in her eye for you.”

“I’ll tell her on down the trace.”