Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

“Nothing. That’s it. That’s all I wanted. Thank you.”

Perry finished his beer, and when he did, flagged down the bartender.

“Another?”

“No, I’m done. But a quick favor for me, if you would. When you see Kat Realbird give her a message for me. Tell her the General is back in town.”

—

That night Perry fell asleep waiting, nursing a beer, still in full uniform on the king-sized bed. When the knock on the door came, he thrashed awake and spilled the beer down the side of his tunic.

She stood in the shadows thrown by the motel vapor lights. She was in full regalia — a turkey-bone breastplate, a fawn leather breechclout — her hair braided and adorned with a single raven’s feather. Her paint was different this year, the left side of her face starting below the eye was chalk white; the right side was unpainted except for a red, quarter-sized circle on her high cheekbone.

Crossing the threshold she was on him hard, her hands twisted in his tunic, her lips dampening his full mustache. She drove him back onto the bed and her smell — a mixture of leather, bear-grease face paint and knockoff Chanel No. 5—came over him. He breathed in where her neck met her shoulder and it was like a return home after a long journey fraught with uncertainty and peril.

—

“I think about you,” he said. “Back home at work I sometimes put on my uniform and imagine this. I’ll sometimes spend whole days downstairs in my office, in full dress. I do conference calls in my hat and gloves and cavalry pants. It makes me feel closer to you — to this.”

He was still on the bed. She was in the room’s small bathroom washing off the face paint and rinsing the grease from her hair. She came out toweling her hair, her face clean and bare. He could see the faint pockmarks on her cheeks.

“I have to wash that stuff off, or I break out terribly.”

“Kat, did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“And? Do you think of me? During the year, in your real life?”

“I do. But it doesn’t change anything, so I try not to.”

She got in bed and put her body tight next to his, her face on his bare chest. She twisted a lock of his long blond hair between her fingers and then put the ends in her mouth, wetting it to a tip like a paintbrush. She traced invisible designs on his chest.

“You painted your face different this year,” he said. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Oh? You have a lot of half-naked Indian women in traditional dress coming to your hotel rooms these days?”

“Of course. But I send them all away.”

“Sha, you know no one but me is crazy enough to do this with you. Just so you know, I wasn’t going to do it this year, the reenactment. But when I came to the War Bonnet, and heard you were back I just couldn’t not come. I gave John some half-assed excuse and came up to my cousin’s. You realize that I just snuck out and walked a mile across Crow Agency in the dark in a breechclout with no panties or bra?”

“Thank you. You were beautiful. You are beautiful.”

“Sha, yousay. General?”

“Hm?”

“I’ve had a bad year.”

—

The first day of the reenactment went as well as could be expected. They did three shows each day of the weekend, and the first was always the roughest. There were always logistics to be straightened out. Horses that acted up. That was Perry’s least favorite part about the whole thing. The horses. Inevitably he got stuck on some knobby nag that wanted to stop mid-battle to take a mouthful of grass or take a shit right were Perry was supposed to lie after being killed.

As had become their custom, on the first day Perry waited on Last Stand ridge until Kat had time to get there and kill him. He knew it pissed some of the guys off, the way he refused to go down until Kat came flying up the ridge and vaulted from her horse with a piercing war cry — but so what, tough shit for them. She would run at him and he would fall under her weight. As she pretended to slit his throat she always gave him a full kiss on the lips, her body shielding this from the people watching in the grandstands. He never wanted her more than right then. Pretend dead on his back in the dust and the horseshit, an erection straining the front of his blue cavalry trousers.

This year was different, but only a little. Perry staggered and gestured as if he were in agony. The field was littered with the bodies of the fallen, and he could sense their annoyance. Fucking go down already, man, one of the dead bluecoats lying in the dust near him muttered. It’s hotter than hell out here. Show’s over. Warriors on horseback were circling and Perry stumbled and then rose slowly to his feet. The crowd was clapping and cheering, and he was scanning the ridgeline for Kat. And then she came and it was a sight to see. She and her horse were cast from the same mold. Her brown thighs rippled and tensed, echoing, rhyming the muscled brown haunches of her mount. Everything was black streaming hair, black flowing mane. He turned to face her and when she swung one leg and sprung from the horse he caught a fast glimpse of taut inner thigh. His heart hiccupped. She rushed him and tackled him full force. He tried to get a quick feel of breast as he went down but she made a show of pinning his arms as she straddled him with her knife between her teeth. She brought the dulled blade across his throat theatrically and when she leaned in close for the kiss he thought he saw tears smearing the paint on her cheeks. It could have been sweat. But then he saw her sad smile.

—

There were no good restaurants in Crow Agency — actually no restaurants at all if you didn’t consider fast food a viable option — so he bought steaks and they grilled them on the small fenced patio off the back of his hotel room. It didn’t matter, about the lack of restaurants, because they couldn’t have been seen like that anyway, out together. The reservation was small. Word would have traveled.

Perry got the beer she liked, Corona, and they drank them while he messed with the steaks. Kat painted her toenails, her knees drawn up to her chest. Over the top of the warped vinyl patio fence Perry could just make out a ragged flock of turkey vultures circling over the battlefield, searching for stray hot dogs and partially eaten Indian tacos left by the tourists.

“Do you mind if I call my wife quickly?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Okay, we’ll eat soon.”

He went into the room and left the door open behind him. He sat on the edge of the bed and called.

“Andy. Hi, it’s me.”

“Oh, hi, I was just loading the dishwasher, just a minute.” Perry heard the phone being fumbled. He could see her fumbling it, her hands wet with soap.

“Okay, I’m back. How did it go today?”

“Pretty good. Hot and dusty. But we put on a good show. I think the people were happy. During the second act the guy that finally killed me was a little rough with the takedown. I’ve got some bruises.”

“Geez, my poor banged-up man. What do these guys think? It’s not your fault how everything worked out, you know, the scope of history and all that. They won the battle; we won the war. No need to take it out on you. Actually, I don’t know how you do it. I think it would start to get to me, you know, dying every day. It’s like you’re a sacrifice.”

“Or a martyr for the greater American conscience.”

“Yeah, that’s it, Jesus H. Custer dying for our sins. Three times a day.”

“Whose sins exactly, do you suppose?”

“I’m not sure, everyone’s, I guess. What are we even talking about?”

“I don’t know either, never mind. How are you feeling today? Yesterday you seemed tired.”

“Yeah, to tell you the truth I hardly remember our conversation. I was a little whacked-out. This new stuff they’ve got me on is potent.”