Philipp Meyer - The Son

“I saw Sher Washburn the other day,” he said. “He mentioned he had rode with you and I thought I knew your name. Then I found I had wrote it down.”

I looked at him.

“Your daddy talked about you a fair bit. We all knew.”

“Who are you?” I said.

“I rode in from Nacadoch. I’m trying my hand at granging up there but I have kept this a long time to give to you.”

Inside the wallet was a scalp vest. Dozens of scalps, some with the hair on, others with the hair off, sewn together in a careful pattern. They all looked dark.

“Oh, they’re all Injun,” he said. “You can be goddamn sure of that; I probably helped your daddy with about half of ’em.” I handled the vest; it was soft and finely made and I thought of Toshaway, who had his own shirt made of scalps. I had buried him in it.

“Can I give you something for it?”

“Nope.” He shook his head and went to spit and then stopped himself.

“Let’s get into the air,” I said.

We walked toward the edge of town.

“You know he went after you, don’t you? He was always worrying if you knew that. They got as far as the Llano before they lost the trail.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Oh, he went after you all right.”

We reached the water and stood there and there was not much to say. A few boatmen were poling supplies for the settlers upriver. I took out my piece of thick and offered it and he cut off a chunk and put it in his lip.

“Your daddy was somethin’ else,” he said. “He could smell the Indians better than a wolf.”

“What happened to him?”

He was looking over the water. “I remember you could stand on Congress and hear billiards in one ear and whoopin’ aborgoins out the other. There was thirty, forty houses, maybe. And now look at it.” He looked behind us at the town, where there were now thousands of people. Down on the riverbank, the ferryman was doing a brisk business.

“What happened to him?” I said again. He was quiet and I thought of my father coming back to his house and wife and daughter and then I thought of him riding out after us. I watched the water. I could feel my fear drifting away from me.

The man just stood there. He never answered.

She knew she was not alone, there was someone in the room, the person responsible for her condition. I’m living through my own death, she thought, and let herself drift. A cold place. An old pond. But the mind, she thought, the mind will survive, that was the great discovery, it was all connected, it was roots beneath the earth. You had only to reach it. The great hive.

She was not sure of herself; she felt like a child. The mind was just… it was the soul, they had always said it. The body shrank, it shrank and shrank while the soul grew and grew until the body could no longer hold it. You could build a pyramid or vault but it did not matter, the body shrank and stooped, they were right, she thought, they had been right all along, it was an error, the worst of her life. You have to wake up.

She opened her eyes but she was not in the room, there were colors, a landscape, a green plain going on as far as she could see and in front of her, an immense canyon drifting among clouds in a bright sky. This is not my memory, she thought, this belongs to someone else. She could see a coyote padding in a bar ditch, scents sounds it was taking in everything; she thought of a lock, a gate, a man shooting a gun.

She opened her eyes, latched on to the room, counting the chairs tables drawings, embers on the hearth, she was back in the house in River Oaks. Hank was by the window. He was angry about the children. Or something else: the television. The president had been shot and his wife was climbing over the seat.

“H.L. fucking Hunt,” Hank was saying, “we just killed the president.”

There was a voice, hers: “They say Oswald was working for the Russians.”

This is not real either, she thought. Hank had died before JFK. She was mixing things up.

But Hank did not appear to notice. “Hunt has a thousand people waiting for him at the airport with signs saying TRAITOR and YANKEE GO HOME. A few hours later, they shoot him.”

“It’s a little obvious,” she said.

There was the fireplace burning. Hank was looking out the window, but what he saw she couldn’t say. “When God dumps a lot of money in your lap, you start thinking you are closer to him than other people.”

Then he was kissing her. It went on, he didn’t notice that she was old, that she had lost her teeth. Then they were making love. She winked out, then came back again.

They were standing by the bar.

“Are we in on anything with Hunt?”

“No,” she said.

“That is a relief.” He sipped his whiskey. “If he weren’t such a hick, he’d be dangerous.”

“You’re a hick, darling.”

“I’m a hick with an art collection. A hundred years from now, we’ll be the Rockefellers.”

Of course it was not the Rockefellers he meant. It was the Astors. Or the Whitneys. As for their collection, half of what they’d first bought was fake and it had taken her the rest of her life to replace them with the originals.

AS FOR JFK, it had not surprised her. The year he died, there were still living Texans who had seen their parents scalped by Indians. The land was thirsty. Something primitive still in it. On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom, and while Jesus was walking to Calvary the Mogollon people were bashing each other with stone axes. When the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudos… but whether they had wiped out the Mogollons or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apaches. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanches. Who were finally wiped out by the Americans.

A man, a life — it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.

Four days since we returned from Piedras Negras. Of course they noticed our absence — my Chandler was gone overnight — but nothing was said. María believes we were missed in the bustle.

Landmen have flooded the town; strangers appear at our door at all times of the day and lights burn at my father’s house all night. Both the Midkiffs and Reynoldses have been selling leases, but my father has turned down every offer that has come our way. I went over to his house to talk to him and found him sitting naked in the pool by his spring. His eyes were closed. In the water he looked like a small pale imp.

“I dunno why this heat never got to me before,” he said.

“You are getting old,” I told him.

“So are you.”

“We ought to sell some leases and forget about this.”

“That girl still in the house?”

I didn’t answer.

“You know, if I hadn’t kept your mother locked up I would swear you got made by an Indian.”

“You wouldn’t have been home to notice if I had,” I said.

He considered that, then changed the subject.

“Let them find some more oil and then we’ll consider selling leases.”

I sat down on the rocks.