Philipp Meyer - The Son

The Germans were as naked as we were. One was seventeen or eighteen and the other a little older, and while they were both covered in blood and filth it was obvious they were at the peak of their female charms. The more I looked at them, the more I began to hate them and I hoped the Indians would degrade them some more and I would be able to watch.

My brother said, “I hate those Dutch women and I hope the Indians give them a good fucking.”

“Me too.”

“You seem to be holding up, though.”

“Because I don’t keep falling off my horse.” We had stopped twice that night so they could lash my brother on tighter.

“I’ve been trying to catch a hoof in the head, but I haven’t been so lucky.”

“I’m sure Momma would be happy to hear that.”

“You’ll make a good little Indian, Eli. I’m sorry I won’t be there to see it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know the reason I didn’t shoot is because I didn’t want them to hurt Mother or Lizzie.”

“You froze up.”

“They would have killed Mother anyway, that’s obvious, but they would have taken Lizzie with us. It was only because she’d been shot that…”

“Shut up,” I said.

“You didn’t have to see what they did to her.”

I was looking at him. He looked the same as always with his squinty eyes and thin lips but he seemed like someone I’d known a long time ago.

A little later he told me he was sorry.

The Indians passed around a few pieces of jerked meat from the teamsters. One of the Germans asked me where I thought we were going. I pretended not to understand her. She knew better than to talk to Martin.

THE NEXT DAY the views got longer. We were in a canyon ten miles wide, the walls going up a thousand feet above us, all red rock. There were cottonwoods and hackberries but not many other trees and we passed a magenta spear point in the sand, twin to the one I’d seen below our house. There were stone creatures in every rock and stream bank: a nautilus big as a wagon wheel, the horns and bones of animals larger than anything still alive on the earth.

Toshaway told me in Spanish that by fall the canyon would be full of buffalo. He was appreciating the scene. There were long tufts of black hair streaming from the cedar and mesquite; the buffalo had been using this place a long time.

The Indians showed no sign of tiring or of wanting a proper feed, but the pace had slowed. My mouth was watering; any number of fish could have been speared as we passed: the water was full of yellow cats, eels, buffalo fish, and gar. I lost count of the whitetail and antelope. A cinnamon grizzly, the largest I’d ever seen, was sunning himself on a ledge. Springs flowing down cliff faces, pools underneath.

That night we made our first real camp and I fell asleep in the rocks holding my brother. Someone put a buffalo robe over us and when I looked up, Toshaway was squatting next to me. His smell was becoming familiar. “Tomorrow we’ll make a fire,” he said.

The next morning we rode past sandstone mesas with figures scratched into the rock: shamans, men in combat, lances and shields and tipis.

“You know they’re going to separate us,” Martin said.

I looked at him.

“These guys are from two different bands.”

“How would you even know?” I said.

“The one who owns you is Kotsoteka,” he said. “The one who owns me is Yamparika.”

“The one who owns me is Toshaway.”

“That’s his name. He’s from the Kotsoteka band. The one who owns me is Urwat. They’ve been saying that Urwat has a long way to go, but the guy who owns you is not that far from home.”

“They don’t own us,” I said.

“You’re right. Why they might have that impression is completely beyond me.”

We continued to ride.

“What about the Penatekas?”

“The Penatekas are sick right now, or something else bad is happening to them. I can’t tell except that none of these are Penatekas.”

DESPITE TOSHAWAY’S PROMISE, we made another cold camp that night. In the morning we climbed out of the big canyon and onto the plains. There was no timber, no trail, no lines of brush to mark a stream, it was nothing but grass and sky and my stomach felt wobbly just looking at it. I knew where we were: the Llano Estacado. A blank space on the map.

After riding an hour nothing had changed and I was dizzy again. We might have gone ten inches or ten miles and by the end of the day I thought something had come loose in my head. My brother fell asleep and rolled all the way under his horse and the Indians stopped, beat him, and tied him back on.

We made camp at a stream cut so deep into the plain you could not see it until you were on top of it. It was our first fire and because there were no trees to reflect the light, it could not be seen from any distance. A pair of antelopes were thrown on, skin and all, and Toshaway brought us a pile of steaming half-cooked venison. My brother didn’t have the energy to eat. I chewed the meat into small pieces and fed it to him.

Then I climbed out of the streambed to have a look. The stars came down to the earth on all sides and the Comanches had pickets looking for other campfires. They ignored me. I went back to our pallet.

A catamount screamed at us for nearly an hour, and wolf calls were echoing from one side of the plain to the other. My brother began to cry out in his sleep; I started to shake him, then stopped. There wasn’t any dream he could be having that would be as bad as waking up.

THE NEXT MORNING they didn’t bother to tie us. There was nowhere to go.

My brother, despite having eaten real food and slept six hours, was not any better. Meanwhile the Indians were laughing and cutting capers, riding their horses backward or standing up, calling back and forth with jokes. I fell asleep and woke up in the grass. We stopped and I was tied on again, slapped a few times but not beaten. Toshaway came over and gave me a long drink of water, then chewed up some tobacco and rubbed the juice into my eyes. Still I spent the rest of the day not knowing if I was asleep or awake. I had the feeling that somewhere ahead of us was the edge of the earth and if we reached it we would never stop falling.

That afternoon a small herd of buffalo were spotted and run down and after a discussion my brother and I were taken off our horses and led to one of the calves. It was cut open and its innards pulled out. Toshaway cut into the stomach and offered me a handful of curdled milk but I did not want any part of it. Another Indian forced my brother’s head into the stomach but he shut his eyes and mouth. I was given the same treatment. I tried to swallow the milk but instead I aired my paunch.

This was done two or three times, with my brother not swallowing at all, me trying and throwing up, until the Indians gave up trying and scooped out all the curdled milk for themselves. When the stomach was empty the liver was cut out. My brother refused to touch it and I saw the way they looked at him so I forced myself to keep it down. The blood turned in my gizzard. I had always thought blood tasted like metal but that is only if you drink a small amount. What it actually tastes like is musk and salt. I reached for more liver and the Indians were happy to see it and I continued to eat until they slapped me away and ate the rest of the liver themselves, squeezing the gallbladder over it as a sauce.

When the organs were gone the calf was skinned out and a piece of meat held up to the sun in an offering and then the rest distributed to everyone, about five pounds apiece. The Indians finished their allotment within a few minutes and I was worried they would take mine so I ate quickly as well.

It was the first time I’d had a full belly in nearly a week and I felt tired and peaceful but my brother just sat there, sunburned and filthy and covered in his own vomit.