James Burke - Two for Texas

“You bought yourself the float across and that’s all. Ride your horses down the plank and tie them on the back end. I can’t get off the mudbank with the weight up front.”

They walked their horses onto the ferry, the hooves clopping on the planed cypress boards, and tethered them to the back rail. Son slid off his horse and had to support himself momentarily against the horse’s neck. The ferry moved out into the current, straining against the pulley rope that stretched from one bank to the other. Sweat boiled off the ferry-keeper’s face as he pulled on the rope with his wasted arms; then he walked the length of the boat with a long pole stuck into the river bottom. On the Texas side of the river the swollen carcass of a drowned fawn lay in the shadows, and Son could see the sharp backs of enormous garfish that were tearing at its flanks.

The ferry came to rest in a small inlet surrounded with willow trees, and the ferry-keeper dropped his pole on the deck.

“Boy, you look like a dog’s been chewing on your side,” he said.

“Listen, you asshole,” Hugh said. “You say anything more and I’m going to slice your ears off. And if you tell anybody we been through here and I hear about it, I’ll be back and burn your shack down with you and your squaw in it.”

“I get them every day like you two,” the ferry-keeper said. “All of you are running for Texas to hide in Sam Houston’s army. You don’t bother me none.”

“Is that a fact?” Hugh said, and rode his horse at the man and knocked him against the wood railing.

The ferry-keeper stumbled backward, his eyes wide with surprise. “What are you doing?” he said.

Hugh hit him again with the horse and knocked him backward another five feet.

“Just keep on walking,” he said, then herded the man as he would a calf off the back end of the ferry. “That’s right, splash around in it a bit. You can sure use it. In fact, you smell like somebody painted shit on you.”

They rode their horses up the clay bank into a stand of pine trees. The brown needles were thick on the ground and smelled sweet in the wind blowing through the trunks.

“I should have got our pistol and flask back before I run his ass off the boat,” Hugh said.

“Then he could tell the law we stole from him.”

“He ain’t going to tell the law nothing. He didn’t breathe real good there for a minute when I told him I’d make stubs out of his ears. I should have told him I knowed James Bowie. A turd would have rolled out of his pants leg for sure.

“You knew Bowie?”

“I used to play cards with him in New Orleans. Then I run into him a couple of times when I shot buffalo for the Mexicans in Texas.”

“Hugh, have you really done all this stuff?”

“You make up your own mind about it. But I drank many a bottle of whiskey with him and rode alligators with him, too. Jim was always ready for fun or a prank. One night I played cards with him and Jean Lafitte on Royal Street until seven o’clock in the morning. Jim ordered us brandy and coffee and cigars and then we walked down to a pit by the river that had an alligator in it as thick across as your horse. He got the darkies to haul it out of the pit and then he rode it plumb down to the market and fed it a meat pie in the cafe. But he wasn’t nobody to fool with, either. I heared different stories about him and that knife of his — that him and another fellow fought a duel with their wrists tied together, that another time they nailed their buckskin pants legs to a log and went at it — but I know for a fact he got into it on a sandbar out from Natchez and he cut a fellow up after they already put two pistol balls in him.”

“I never asked you this, but why’d you kill that fellow in New Orleans?”

“Every night in the pen when I heared the boys in the dog boxes and thought about all the time I had ahead of me, I tried to figure out that same question myself. We was playing bouree down by the nigger quarters and I seen him reach under his leg for a card. I told him all that money on the table was mine, and he came up with a dirk in his hand. So I picked up a full bottle and busted his head apart like a flower pot.

“But lookie here, let’s talk about where we’re going and what our selections are.”

The trees had become more evenly spaced, and Son could see the rolling green country of east Texas ahead of him.

“How the hell should I know?” Son said. “I never been in Texas. I don’t know what’s out there.”

“A few thousand Mexican soldiers that’s been shot at by Americans.”

“Hugh, you can really lead us someplace, can’t you?”

“Like I said before, when you break out of prison you don’t draw the best card hand in the world.”

“What do you want to do?”

“There ain’t nothing but Indians north of us, and the closest town west is a good ways over on the Brazos. If we go south to the Gulf, maybe we can get a boat out of the whole damn country.”

“To where?”

“Hell, I don’t know everything. Any place where the law ain’t coming up our ass.”

“I ain’t fond of leaving the country,” Son said.

“What do you think you just left? This ain’t the United States no more. All this belongs to Mexico. And right now them Mexicans hates the smell of anything white. I reckon sooner or later they’re going to burn that ferry back there to keep the rest of us out.”

“I don’t want to ride no boat out of the country, Hugh. Let’s go on up north through the Indians till we hit Arkansas.”

“Some of Landry’s piss must have been on that ball, because you got a fever in your brain. There’s Comanches up there, and what they do to you when they catch you ain’t something you want to study on. When I was hunting buffalo they caught one of my partners and roasted him over a fire. Before he was dead they cut off his arms and legs and left him in the coals. I didn’t hunt buffalo no more after that, and I sure ain’t going up in their country again.

“I don’t even know why I’m talking to you like this. We’re going south for the Gulf and we’ll decide about the boat when we get there. We got almost nothing to eat, no gun, and your face is white as bird shit.”

Two hours later they were following a deer trail along the bottom of a hill through a long stretch of piney woods when Hugh sawed in on the bit and grabbed Son’s arm.

“You smell it?” he said.

“What?”

“An Indian camp.”

“I don’t smell nothing.”

“They’re smoking jerky. You hear the dog?”

At first, Son could only hear the hum of his fever in his ears, then when the wind dropped below the trees he heard the angry bark of a dog violating the air.

“They tie a mean one up outside of camp so nobody don’t sneak up on them,” Hugh said. “They’re probably Choctaws, and that means we probably get something to eat tonight and a place to sleep besides the woods.”

“They’re savages.”

“Listen, there ain’t nothing more savage than a white man. I didn’t tell you the rest of that story about my partner getting roasted. The others with us went back to that village at night and killed everybody in it. They even scalped the children.”

In his mind, Son again saw the bodies of his parents in the lot by the burned cabin. His father’s scorched eyes were staring like pieces of fish scale, and his severed fingers had been stuck in his mouth.

The pine trees began to thin and they followed a clear stream with a silt bottom to the edge of a clearing. A dozen tepees, made of stitched deerskins and shaved pines, were arranged in a circle back toward the trees. In the center of the clearing, strips of venison hung from racks over wet fires, and Indian women were throwing handfuls of pine needles into the smoke. Son saw thirty to forty horses penned back in the woods on the far side of the camp.