Katy Smith - Free Men

“Don’t think too much of this,” Cat says, gesturing toward the bags. “You’ll go mad.”

I had struggled to understand how criminals could find comfort in one another, how men in America could bear to be tied up in this dependence, but perhaps this was always only temporary. This brief camaraderie must merely be the odd knot in the loom — soon, their paths will be fanning out again. Except, of course, that this knot is the end, for I am here.

I shift in the tree, and a twig falls. The Indian does not hear.

There is a pleasure in watching men who believe themselves unwatched — to see the frustration on the Indian’s face when he turns away from the black man, or to hear the lullabies the white man half murmurs when the others are asleep — but it is the pleasure of the voyeur, not the participant. And even after what I’ve seen, I am convinced that in the moment of crisis, these men must dissolve. That the connective thread I’ve been looking for must inevitably fray. The whole idea of mine was childish.

After the men finish their breakfast, the Indian shows the white man how to hold a bow.

“Your hands just here,” he says.

Bob, who is laughing, nocks the arrow in. “Don’t point that at me. You get my other arm, you’ll have to carry the sack yourself.”

The white man’s hands are clenched so tight the bow shivers when he breathes.

The Indian points at a tree trunk across the clearing, where a lizard pumps his chest. Their bags and gun are scattered by the fire. The Indian kicks Cat’s leg to draw him out into a proper stance.

I wait, but the white man cannot release the bowstring. The lizard skits away.

Bob touches him once on the back, says, “It’s not a man.”

He drops the bow to his side and the others turn away.

I do not believe in innocence. I have watched men for years, both out of curiosity and for pay, and each one of them wants something so profoundly that he would abandon his own constructed sense of righteousness to pursue it. Desire breeds guilt.

I silently draw up the musket from my lap and point it not at the men, whose flesh is vulnerable through the tatters in their clothes, but straight ahead, at the middle branches of a chestnut across the clearing where a woodpecker is inching up the bark, pausing to flash its head left and right, the red blaze along its crown like a signal to fire.

I fire.

BELOW, THEY FALL to the earth, scrabbling, hands in dirt, hands seeking blind for bags, feet kicking at the dust beneath them, insects in a shadowbox. The Indian runs toward tree cover, his eyes hunting flicker-fast above him, searching for the shot’s origin, but the black man is already rampaging into a thorn thicket, heedless, shouting.

“Get! Get!” he says. “Cat!”

The white man has dropped the bow and is standing by the dead fire looking at his hand, which he flexes out and in as if looking for the bullet hole. The Indian has his gun pointed up now, but he’s found nothing.

“Cat,” the black man whispers now. “Please, please, please, we have to get.”

The white man turns his head up slowly and in the arm of the pecan finds me, or what pieces he can see behind the network of new greenery. He watches me, my gun. His eyes, pale blue, search me for some answer. I am trying to measure his culpability, and he is trying to determine if his life merits saving.

I should climb down from the tree, should shoot at least one of them before the silver disappears, but they are the most vital things in this vast forest, and I cannot.

“Come on,” he says, “come on, Cat, we got you, over here, please, Cat.”

The white man shakes his head, his eyes still on me.

I am witness to the threads between them snapping. In the gaps my gun has opened there is pain. When I hear the sounds of the Indian giving up, slipping away with small crashes through the young trees, I feel a warmth in the back of my jaw like my own mother has turned her back on me.

“I’m ready,” the white man says to the black man, who still clings to a thorn bush. “Mine are the sins.”

“You didn’t lift a finger,” Bob says. “Come on, come on, you’ve got no sins.”

“You’re just as good,” Cat says. “I’ll stay.”

The bags of silver are gone, clutched up in their frantic scrambling, none left for the white man. Though if he moved now, if he went to his companion by the shrub, I am certain they would share the plunder evenly, no matter their disparity in strength, in worth. He looks smaller in the emptiness around the remnant fire. He was always a small man.

With my gun held shoulder-high, I climb down from my perch, sloth slow, and watch as the black man sees a stranger, white, and trades his devotion for terror. He is gone, and Cat is alone.

I stand opposite him in the clearing and he looks at me with blank eyes. I am not human to him, but spirit. I begin reconstructing my composure. This is what I was sent to do; I will write this all down. What I have witnessed will be duly recorded and these men will endure in the annals of humanistic scholarship, and so it is all right that I have botched the assignment from my employer because justice will still claim her quarry. I am sorry that this experiment of mine lost me the other two men and the silver, the worth of which Seloatka couldn’t guess, but this one after all had the bloodstains on his cuffs; his was the guilt that was most palpable. I wish he had not forfeited himself.

After putting down my gun, I pull a rope from my bag and hold it out to show him. He stands, folds his wrists together. I tie it in several knots around the bumps of his bones. I look in the bags left behind for anything of value but find only a dirty cloth and a handful of biscuits cut in lace-like patterns. I offer one to Cat, but he shakes his head.

We turn east now. The low sun is in our eyes.

THE FIRST THING I ask is where he comes from. When he doesn’t respond I offer that I was raised in a small town in France, and when he remains mute I take it as a sign that he would rather spend these hours contemplating his soul, or evaluating some of the inexplicable choices he’s made over the last few days or weeks or whenever this brotherhood began. I can no more worm into his thoughts than I can require him to speak, but I have not already shot him because I am patient, and can wait for explanations. It’s fortunate I can easily follow the trail I myself have left, for the white man seems insensible to his surroundings. I suppose I can no longer call him the white man, there being none others now to distinguish him.

When we bed down for the night I tie his ropes to a tree.

“I won’t run,” he says.

I tell him I believe this, though how can I? Anyone would attempt escape. When society is stripped away, when we are adrift in the ungovernable forest, man is alone, and intent on survival.

Though if there were a criminal less interested in survival, perhaps this is he. I could swear that Cat was growing lighter over the hours I spent with them, that a burden was being gradually laid down while he nurtured a small contentment, but my appearance has oppressed him again. The sins he has claimed are creeping back.

I tie the rope in a sailor’s knot.

“Did you shoot the men?” I ask.

He is quiet, so I pull out my blanket and smooth a patch of dirt for myself. It is hard to find a space in this forest that isn’t interrupted by a surfacing root or a patch of fungus that must be kicked aside, and though I prefer to leave little trace, I must also secure some comfort. Sleeping on puffballs won’t do. By a spitting fire I read back through my notebook and find nothing intelligible. Is awake when others sleep. Gnaws at the fingernail. Enjoys the black man’s humor. Is alert when others speak of women.