Philipp Meyer - The Son

MANY OF THE captives had begun to flee, stealing horses and disappearing across the plains. No one was strong enough to stop them.

As for me, I dug. I wore out all our bone shovels and then I dug with lance shafts, tipi poles, and anything else I could find. I might have dug for weeks, or months, it got colder, the nights were freezing but the daytime sun kept the soil soft, and so I dug. Some of the Comanches who’d recovered from the sickness began to dig alongside me, the color gone from their faces in patches. Some of the survivors hunted so we could keep digging, others did nothing, still waiting to die with their families, until they did not, and so they joined us.

WHILE DIGGING THE grave for Toshaway and Sit utsi, in a place far from the camp, an overlook I’d spent weeks thinking about, I found a small black-and-white cup. It was made of pottery and beneath it, as I dug deeper, I came to a flat stone and beneath that was another stone, and the more I dug, the more stones I found, until the stones turned into a wall, and then a corner of two walls, and then I stopped.

Neither the Comanches nor the Apaches before us had ever built houses of stone, and no horse people would have made pottery. The Caddo and Osage had never lived this far west, and neither had the whites or Spaniards, and I realized I had come on the remains of some ancient tribe that had lived in towns or cities, a tribe so long extinct no one remembered they had ever lived.

I decided to take the cup to ask Grandfather but he was dead, and then I thought I would ask Toshaway but he was dead as well, and I nearly put it down but couldn’t, I couldn’t stop turning it over in my hands, and then I knew why, because it had lain there a thousand years or more and it made Toshaway and all the others seem very young; as if they were young and there was still hope.

The man Phineas introduced her to looked like a sharecropper — a deep tan, high cheekbones, and a raw, underfed look — except for a widow’s peak he might have been a half-breed Indian. He was leaning against the file cabinets in Phineas’s office, trying to act older than he was, and when she came in, he nodded as if he had not seen anything interesting and turned back to her great-uncle. There was something in his manner that made her wonder if this young man had some private relationship with Phineas, if maybe he was part of the reason she was never allowed to stay at her great-uncle’s house. She decided she didn’t like him.

“Hank is a driller,” said Phineas. “And Hank is looking for work.”

Hank nodded to her again but didn’t offer to shake her hand. He and Phineas continued a conversation they were having about rocks and well logging or something equally boring. She half listened and walked around the room, but they continued to talk and she began to wonder why she had been invited, she looked at pictures of Phineas with her family, Phineas with various famous people. The driller wore a white shirt and dark trousers, which were clean but had seen better days; leather work boots, because, she guessed, he had no proper shoes. Still, she found that she wanted him to notice her; he was not properly handsome but there was something. You have been living by yourself too long, she thought.

On the other hand, there were few men whom Phineas treated as equals; for some reason this driller was one of them, though she could not understand exactly why. As for the driller (Hank, she thought), he continued to take no notice of her at all. A secretary walked in, a beauty like all the girls who worked for Phineas, dark hair and creamy skin and all her assets on display in a tight green dress; she went out of her way to touch Hank’s hand as she filled his coffee, but Hank acted as if she didn’t exist, and Jeannie forgave the girl her good looks and became sure that there was something between this young man and her uncle. Finally they finished talking and Phineas swiveled his chair.

“We’re hiring Hank,” he said. “He’ll be heading down to the land with you today.”

THEY DROVE BACK to McCullough Springs in Hank’s old truck. It was hot and noisy; she hoped he wouldn’t notice how much she was sweating. He is just a driller, she reminded herself. And not all that good-looking, either; she was far out of his league. He had a flat nose that might have come from being punched, or might always have been that way. A bit of the cur dog in him, her grandmother would have said, and yet he had a sort of physical confidence that could not be faked, she had seen it in the best vaqueros, there was a swagger about him as if, despite his size, whatever you or anyone else could do, he could do it better. He reminded her of Clint: the sort of man to whom things came easily, who was good at everything he tried.

Hank was twenty-four and had spent the war (and all the years before it, back to early childhood) looking for oil with his father, who was now dead. They had been worth several million at one point, but their last few gambles had not paid off, and then his father was killed in a blowout, leaving Hank in a tight spot. He owned his own Cummins power rig and six-wheel-drive International, knew of dozens of good roughnecks looking for work, but at the moment he barely had money for gas.

“I could rent my rig out,” he said, “but then what would be the point?”

He wasn’t looking for a reply.

“You got brothers or sisters?”

“Three brothers,” she said, “but two died in the war.”

“I’ve got two sisters.”

Something must have occurred to her because he said: “In case you’re wondering, I tried to enlist in ’42, but they turned me down for color blindness.”

She nodded and looked out the window, watched the brush and baked earth pass outside. Everyone who hadn’t served felt compelled to give you their tale of woe.

“Meanwhile I never knew I was color-blind, I see the same as anyone else. A few months later I went to the station in Houston, but I still couldn’t make out the numbers in the test, so they flunked me again, only this time I went back and borrowed the book when they weren’t looking.” He looked at her. “I figured it didn’t cost much.”

“Probably not,” she said.

“Anyway I memorized the numbers and had to drive to New Mexico so they wouldn’t remember they’d already seen me. This time I passed the test, but I must have done it too quick, because they started showing me the pages in a different order and I didn’t get a single goddamn one of them. They knew what I’d done and told me if I ever tried again they were going to have me arrested for interfering with the war effort.”

“That is some story.”

“Interfering with the war effort, you believe that?”

“I believe it was a blessing.”

“Try going four years where everyone thinks you’re a communist or some other type of shirker. I was about to go to Canada and join up there. I probably should have but Daddy talked me out of it.”

“A lot of men in oil and gas were exempted,” she said. “We couldn’t have won the war otherwise.”

“Well, I didn’t intend to be one of them.”

She started to say something else, but he rolled down the window so all the wind came in.

By then they were south of San Antonio, into the great flat plain. She squinted against the glare; the noise made it hard to think. Hank kept the needle at eighty and she wondered what would happen if they lost a tire. She watched the way he drove, the muscles in his arms going tight and then loose again, his jaw working; it was plain he was a man whose mind was always running. She thought about her father, who thought he was a good driver, but was not. Hank kept the truck on a very straight line; he was going too fast but they were not jerking around the road. She wondered about her brothers, what they might say if they could speak, if their opinions might have changed on the war. She supposed it would not be any different. Once men got an idea, they did not seem to care if it killed them or not.