News of the World (5 page)

C
APTAIN KIDD HAD
changed into his reading clothes in the back of the Masonic Hall. They were a decent black frock coat, knee length, single-breasted, a matching vest, a white shirt in silk and cotton figured with a lyre design in silk of the same color—that is, a bit yellowed. He had one of the new ascots in black silk and a low-rise rounded silk topper. He stuffed his stained traveling clothes into the carpetbag and then went out and stepped up on the dais. He placed his bull's-eye lantern to the left on a wooden box (it said
Kilmeyer Beer 50 bttls
), so it would shine on his newspapers.

He greeted the crowd and listened to the clink of dimes and five-cent pieces, two-cent pieces, pennies, and sometimes quarters into the paint can and if it was a quarter people made their own change. There were a good plenty of people. Mist was still coming down in minute blowing drops from the clouds that raced through the sky over Spanish Fort. He unfolded the
London Daily News.
He would give them a few paragraphs of hard news and then read of dreamlike places far removed. This was the arrangement of all his readings. It worked. The lantern
beam shone sideways onto his face, casting brilliant lunar cells of light on his cheekbones through the lenses of his reading glasses. He read an article concerning the Franco-Prussian War. It involved delicate Frenchmen, scented with toilet water, being whipped soundly at Wissembourg by huge blond Germans who were fat and strong on sausages. The outcome was easily predicted. The audience sat rapt, listening. News all the way from France! Nobody knew anything about the Franco-Prussian War but all were jointly amazed by information that had come across the Atlantic to them, here in North Texas, to their town alongside the flooding Red River. They had no idea how it had got here, through what strange lands it had traveled, who had carried it. Why.

Captain Kidd read carefully and precisely. His eyeglasses were round and rimmed in gold over his deep eyes. He always laid his small gold hunting watch to one side of the podium to time his reading. He had the appearance of wisdom and age and authority, which was why his readings were popular and the reason the dimes rang into the coffee can. When they read his handbills men abandoned the saloon, they slipped out of various unnamed establishments, they ran through the rain from their firelit homes, they left the cattle circled and bedded beside the flooding Red to come and hear the news of the distant world.

And now he took them away to far places and strange peoples. Into mythic forms of thought and the structures of fairy tales. He read from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
of Dr. Schliemann's search for windy Troy somewhere in Turkey. He read of the telegraph wires successfully laid from Britain to
India, an article in the
Calcutta Times
forwarded to the London
Daily Telegraph,
a technological advance that seemed almost otherworldly. As he glanced up it seemed to the Captain that he saw the blond man again or at least the glint of ash-blond hair just at the borders of his light. This went into his mind and then out of his mind as he grappled with the big four-sheets of the
Boston Daily Journal.
To finish, he read of the unfortunate
Hansa
crushed in the pack ice in its attempt on the North Pole, the survivors rescued by a whaler. This was proving the most popular as he could see by the small gestures of the audience; they bent forward, they fixed their eyes upon him to hear of undiscovered lands in the kingdoms of ice, fabulous beasts, perils overcome, snow people in furry suits.

Simon came in the rear door of the Masonic Lodge just as he was replacing his newspapers into the portfolio.

Sir, the girl's gone.

Nothing galvanizes people like news of a missing child. The Captain swept everything into his portfolio, his newspapers and eyeglasses, the bull's-eye lantern with its smoldering wick, and the money tin; jammed his silk hat on his head; and ran to the door and straight out into the rain.

They had fallen asleep, he and Doris, sitting on the shot box and the flour keg, leaning together against the big rear wheel in front of a good fire. Something made Simon wake up and she was gone.

She had left on foot. The doll was gone too.

It is easier to track a barefoot person than somebody with shoes. The toes dig in with four distinct marks and the big toe like a misplaced thumb broad alongside. The bull's-eye lantern
beam picked up her prints on the sloppy, red-clay road going out of Spanish Fort, east toward the river. The river which was joyous in its escape from banks and boundaries, which had become a rolling inland sea. They could hear it from half a mile away. The rain increased, lightning came cracking down out of the northwest as the new storm front moved in on them in the night. The lantern lit the million billion drops that came down in colors of steel and ice. She had followed the ruts in the wagon road that led to the river. The track wound about among the post oak and bur oaks, twisted trees with fright wigs of dry leaves and soon the track would come to the edge of the flood.

The Captain walked bent over and rained upon. His joints hurt. He needed to find somebody younger to take her south and deal with this kind of thing. Somebody agile and patient and strong.

He and Simon the fiddler soldiered on.

She's gone and it's my fault! Simon slapped himself on the thigh. It made a wet smack. Captain, I am so sorry!

He had to shout over the noise of the rain. He gripped his hat brim and ran alongside the Captain.

Never mind! the Captain shouted back. Can't be helped!

He would as soon have Simon with him as anybody. Despite his short stature the fiddler was very strong and a hard fighter and a good shot. They ran on into the rain as if into a thicket. They bulled their way through. They tripped over the cut stumps where someone had cleared ground and tangled themselves in the parasitic love vine. They came upon Pasha and Fancy grazing, and were snorted at. The Captain felt himself growing thinner even as they walked. A man his age should
have more weight on him, he should be in a hotel room in Spanish Fort after a good supper and leaning on the sill with tobacco smoke rolling out of his nose, watching the dim lights in the windows and counting his money. This was unfair.

They stopped when they saw the glinting water. There at its edge, on a lift of red stone no more than thirty yards ahead, stood Johanna, wet as a dishcloth and her skirts heavy with rain. She clutched the doll to her chest. In the explosive lightning flashes the Captain could see, on the far side of the flood, a party of Indians. They were on the move. They had probably been flooded out of their campsite. The Red was still rising. Entire pecan trees rolled and ground like mill wheels in the current. The Indians had stopped to look across, perhaps at the distant lights of Spanish Fort, and Johanna was calling to them in Kiowa but they could not hear her. It was too far, the river was too loud.

Johanna! the Captain called. Johanna!

She put down the doll and shouted at the Indians with her hands around her mouth. What could she possibly think would happen? That they would come for her? She was shouting for her mother, for her father and her sisters and brothers, for the life on the Plains, traveling wherever the buffalo took them, she was calling for her people who followed water, lived with every contingency, were brave in the face of enemies, who could go without food or water or money or shoes or hats and did not care that they had neither mattresses nor chairs nor oil lamps. They stood and stared across the water at her like creatures of the
sidhe,
wet and shining in every flash from overhead. They stood among their jackstrawed tipi poles heaped on horses, drenched
children gazing at her out of buffalo robes on the travois, the men ahead and at the side with their weapons wrapped in whatever would keep them dry. One of them shouted back over the water. The lightning made them appear in every detail like an intaglio and then disappear and then reappear again.

Johanna called again.
I have been taken prisoner, rescue me, take me back.
She would turn her back on the modern world with the telegraph and the railroads and its elaborate political constructions piled layer upon layer. Everything gone . . . everything. And she would live in constant movement over the face of the earth, in gratitude to the sun and the grass, often dirty and lousy and wet and cold like those on the other side but she did not care.

One of the warriors on the far side unsheathed a long weapon and lifted it. A lengthy barrel shone blue-white in a lightning flash. He aimed it and fired. A muzzle flash as long as a chimney brush and then the heavy bullet struck the stone near them and sent pieces of red sandstone flying. The report came to them as a dull
chunk
sound. They had not heard her; they didn't know who she was. A warning shot; stay away.

The fiddler and the Captain fell flat, hands outstretched in the tall brown grasses.

That was a Sharps! shouted the fiddler.

The girl still called out, she had not moved. Then she bent to place the doll to sit against the rock, facing Indian Territory.

Fifty caliber, said the Captain. If he fired once he'll fire again.

He jumped up and grabbed the ten-year-old girl by the back of her dress and swung her around and ran. He shifted
his grasp to one of her arms, and the fiddler got the other arm and so they dragged her back to her fate. To the wagon, to the white man's necessary world which did not seem to want her either. Another giant five-hundred-and-twenty-grain bullet tore through the air overhead. Even above the noise of the rain they heard the
nyow-ow-ow
sound and it hit a bur oak and tore off a limb big as a drainpipe.

At the
Curative Waters
wagon the Captain sat awake late in the rainy dark and counted his money and thought about the long series of roads to San Antonio and Castroville. The girl was asleep. He slowly changed his clothes. He hurt in all his joints. He reflected on how she had not cried once. His pipe and the tot of rum Doris and Simon had left for him were of some comfort. He needed it. He stewed silently at the imposition of it all. He must have been out of his mind. Senile dementia. But he had promised.
I'll do it,
he thought.
I will get her back to her relatives if I never cock another gun.
He read through the Boston paper, staring mindlessly at advertisements for cures and false hair.

THEY CONTINUED ON
to the south. He had forgotten to find a blacksmith for the cracked tire rim but the wheels had swollen in the wet and perhaps had seized it tight to the felloes. The trace chains jingled, the horses' hooves kicked up little gouts of mud, the forested, hilly landscape slowly moved backward on either side. It was a mild day with white steam rising from the damp hollows. He would have to get the tire fixed in Dallas and his money was short. After he had paid the Masonic Hall and bought more supplies and grain for the horses, there was not much left.

Since they had left the town she now sat up beside him and sang to herself, one hand dancing in the air. With the resilience of a ten-year-old she had accepted that she could not cross the Red and rejoin her people and so she sang and made dancing gestures.

Well then, Johanna, he said. He had calmed himself. It was time to be patient. Auntie? Uncle? You will soon see them.

She stared straight ahead with the blank look that meant a dredging of the mind, a searching through old indexes.

He tried German.
Tante
Anna, he said.
Onkle
Vilhelm.

She turned to him.
Ja,
she said. There was surprise in her voice. Then she seemed to struggle with a tangled thing inside her head, something knotted that would not unknot.

She opened both stained hands on her lap and stared at the palms. She shut her fingers. She wasn't really seeing anything. Her face was no longer a child's face but one that had gone through something beyond description or comprehension and so was suspended for a moment in wordlessness. Her hands opened and shut, opened and shut.

And then she spoke. Mama, Papa. She lifted her head to him.
Todt,
she said.

They rolled through a bur oak forest with the steady click of the break in the iron tire counting out its revolutions; Fancy's harness jingled. Crooked zigzag limbs sifted through the air. Beneath them the crisp shells of acorns made crushed sounds.

The Captain looked down at her, into her guileless eyes and the rediscovered pain in them. Sudden terrible memories. He bit the left side of his lower lip and was sorry he had brought
it up. He tucked the blanket more tightly around her neck and smiled at her.

He said, Never mind, my dear. Let's try an English lesson. She nodded gravely with one hand opening and shutting on a sleeve flounce.

Hand, he said. He held up his hand.

Hont, she said.

Horse. He pointed to Fancy jogging along ahead of them.

Hoas.

The Captain knew nothing of the Kiowa language but he knew it had no
R
.

Very good! he said in a cheerful tone.

Felly good.

But now her voice was low and discouraged. She had left the
taina
to keep watch across the Red River for her. That was taken care of. Now she had to begin a new, long, hard road to somewhere else. Felly good.

THEY CROSSED CLEAR
Creek and then Denton Creek and two days later they came finally into the small town of Dallas about four o'clock of a chilly afternoon. The girl was even more subdued and frightened than in Spanish Fort, stunned by the noise and the wagons. There were several two-story buildings of brick and stone. She jumped back into the rear and pressed against the backrest of the wagon seat, between the flour keg and his carpetbag. They came in to town on the north road, where it led past several blacksmith shops with their great shed-roof caverns and lit with scarlet light, full of men and
horses, tobacco smoke and the noise of metal being forced to hold the things of this world together bolt by bolt. Johanna glanced into them with deep apprehension. The Captain was happy to see them. He would bring the wagon in tomorrow. First, of course, he would have to ask the price of a new tire rim and the labor.