James Burke - Two for Texas

“Like what?” Hugh said, taking a twist of tobacco from his pocket.

“Like getting your ass out of this army.”

“I’ll be here when we pop our first caps on them Mexicans. When that time comes, you just stay behind me and find out how it’s done.” He balanced his rifle on his shoulder, holding the barrel in the crook of his arm, and walked back toward the woods to begin digging another latrine.

One morning Erastus Deaf Smith needed three men to go with him to Bexar and deliver a message to James Bowie and pick up a wagon load of powder, caps, flints, and lead bars for shot. Smith was Houston’s scout, without rank or title except “scout,” and he looked as though he had been hammered together out of pig iron. Any movement of his thick body made the muscles tighten against his buckskin clothes, and his broad face and wide-set eyes had the resolution of a skillet. A fever had destroyed most of his hearing when he was a child, and he talked in a quacking voice as he tried to imitate what he thought words should sound like. But he read lips, in both English and Spanish, he could see a deer flash through a dappled woods a half mile away, and sometimes he would suddenly rein his horse to a stop, dismount and stand silently for a moment, then point in the direction of approaching riders just before they came into sight. He was absolutely without fear and the only man in the Texas army whom Houston trusted completely.

Every soldier within earshot of his quacking voice volunteered for the trip to Bexar. Corporal Burnett appointed himself as an accepted volunteer, then Hugh pushed through the others and stood directly in front of Smith so his lips could be read.

“That’s me and Son Holland, Deaf,” he said. “I know Jim Bowie. He ain’t going to be able to read General Sam’s letter unless I get him sober first. I ain’t sure that drunk sonofabitch can read, anyway. I’ll probably have to do it for him.”

“Hold it,” Corporal Burnett said.

“Deaf don’t take no orders from you. Ain’t that right, Deaf? The general told you to pick out some good men, and you got them right here.”

“You can’t drink with Bowie in Bexar,” Smith said.

“You ever seen me drunk?” Hugh said. “I ain’t like these others. I wouldn’t touch that green Mexican piss they drink.”

“You’re supposed to be cutting wood today, Allison,” Corporal Burnett said.

“I done that last night while you was sleeping on picket. How about it, Deaf? I really want to see Jim again.”

“Take two powder horns each,” Smith said. “Tell the cook to give you beef in your ration and none of that salted pork. Get gum coats from somebody if you ain’t got them. It’s going to be stringing frogs by this afternoon.”

The sky was blue with only a few pink clouds on the horizon.

“If that’s what you say, Deaf. We ain’t going to be but a minute.”

Hugh crawled inside his and Son’s lean-to, stuck the Colt’s revolver inside his belt, handed Son his rifle, and stooped back into the light with his short-barrel musket in one hand and his sailcloth sack with the sewed tie string in the other. They started walking toward the cooking area in the center of the woods. Hugh’s walleye was as bright as a black marble. “You ain’t thinking right, Hugh,” Son said. “Maybe Landry or some of them other Frenchies are still there.”

“I don’t give a shit if they are. I can’t take no more of this hiding in a rat hole.”

“You was talking about not being foolish, and now you’re ready to put our balls on a stump just to get away from camp for a few days.”

“Ben Milam took that town for the Texians. We’re in the Texian Army, ain’t we? And Jim Bowie’s there. He’d hack that mulatto’s head off if they tried to put manacles on us.”

“You ain’t thinking about the two-hundred-dollar bounty that Landry probably promised every piece of white trash in Bexar, either,” Son said.

“They’ll have to take on Jim, too, if they’re going to get it. And there ain’t no white man that stupid.”

“Hugh, you just ain’t using your head like you usually do. Maybe if we don’t do nothing dumb now, we’ll be out of all that trouble back in Louisiana.”

“You make your own selections. I’m going to see Jim, I’m going to get drunk with him, and I’m going to forget all them latrines I dug because a corporal with pap still on his mouth told me to do it.”

“That ain’t what you told Deaf.”

“You don’t ever learn nothing, do you? Deaf wants you and me because we got these leg-iron scars on our ankles. We ain’t going to desert and ride down the pike to find a better deal with a dumb ass like James Fannin, and we ain’t going to shoot off our mouth to no Mexican spy in a saloon or jenny-barn. He wouldn’t take nobody with him unless they was the best, and I got a feeling that General Sam already told him me and you was going.”

They stood by the large Dutch oven built of field stones, where the cooks were frying salted pork and boiling a gruel made of cracked corn and molasses in an iron pot. The cooks were a filthy lot, their faces and beards blackened by soot, and Son had heard that two of them had the clap.

Hugh handed one of them his sailcloth sack.

“We’re going out with Deaf this morning. He says to fill it up with beef and any pickled tomatoes and melon you got.”

“You want what?” the cook said, staring back with his grimy face above the smoke.

“Deaf don’t want no salted pork. That’s clear enough, ain’t it? Just give us some of that smoked beef and any pickled tomatoes or melon that you ain’t ate yourself.”

“Allison, you lying sonofabitch, you tried this on me before. You get out of my kitchen or I’ll give you another eye that looks like that ugly one you already got.” The cook had a long pine branch in his hand that he had been using to stoke the fire.

“Maybe you better go back and talk with Deaf about it, cook,” Son said. “There he is over by General Sam’s tent. Lookie there, Sam’s coming out the flap now.”

“I wish somebody would tell me what the hell is going on around here,” the cook said, opening the tie string on Hugh’s sack. “I have to feed all you miserable sonsofbitches, and you don’t give me nothing in turn except trouble and some half-ass story about you got to go off with Deaf. Nobody told me a damn thing about it. If you can’t shit in the morning, you blame it on me. If it runs down your leg, you blame it on me, too. Now Deaf sends you in here for what little preserves I got left to keep you all from getting scurvy, and somebody’s going to be bitching about that, too. You take this, Allison, and tell that stupid sonofabitch Deaf to learn how to use the human language so this camp don’t turn into one big latrine.”

It started raining hard that afternoon, and they were still five miles from Bexar when they stopped late the next night and slept in a farmer’s barn. The following morning they rode into town, and the sand-colored stucco buildings with their Spanish ironwork and the cobblestone streets were wet and brilliant in the sunlight. The town reminded Son of New Orleans, except it was filled with Texas soldiers who seemed as out of place there as an occupying army in a foreign country. The saloons were crowded early in the day with men who spoke in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia accents, and they behaved as though it were July Fourth back in the United States. When Son thought of the despondency in his camp on the Guadalupe, he wondered if these men were fighting in the same war as Houston’s soldiers. He reached over and touched Deaf on the shoulder.

“These bastards act like they popped their last cap on the Mexicans,” he said.

Deaf stretched his arms on the pommel of his saddle and shook his head.