The Color of Lightning (20 page)

“What is up there?” asked Britt. He lifted his chin toward the northwest. “How far can you go before you reach the ocean?” Cajun

moved along steadily and sometimes broke into his easy, smooth trot.

“The what?” Tissoyo turned and squinted at him.

“El mar, el gran mar.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, how far can you go the way we are going?”

Tissoyo thought for a moment, his clean expressionless eyes flat to his face, staring toward the northwest. One hand lay on his thigh and the other across the bow of his saddle with the reins in it. The constant wind lifted the tasseled ends of his braids.

“After a long time you come to very high mountains. There is always snow on them. The peaks rise up so.” He lifted his hand, bent at the wrist, the palm upright. “Straight up. There are no ante- lope or buffalo there. But there are a lot of elk. The truly big bears are there.” He lifted a forefinger to his lips and then dropped his hand on his thigh again. “They say the half-a-men live in the rocks.
Nenapi,
they fade in and out of the rocks.” He opened and shut his hand. “Dangerous little
pendejos.
”

The blue slopes of the Wichita Mountains fell away behind them. They were passing around their western end and riding slowly higher and higher as the level of the Great Plains rose with every mile. In a long stretch that was f loored with small sand dunes and bear grass they came upon the wreckage of several wagons. Weathered wood and unburied bones. Tipped wheels de- graded into sections that had bleached to the color of burnished steel. There were scattered planks and round skulls half buried like kickballs with hopeless eyes.

Tissoyo sat and studied them for a while and then wondered if these were not the remains of the men who had been in the fight on the Little Robe River in his father’s time. He slid from his horse and watched as a snake of some sort made a wavering in the grasses and noted where it went. He pressed away the rags of leather from a heap of human bone that had grown glossy from the things that had gnawed them. Whoever they were, they had been somebody, he said.

Britt knew the bones should be buried. He sat on Cajun and thought about it, but then they went on.

At the crossing of the Washita River they found shallow pools of water among flat stones where they could safely wade in. The main current was a choppy, fluent gray stretch of water that hissed at the banks. On both sides the great fragile cottonwoods with their chat- tering leaves. Tissoyo gathered handsful of buffalo grass and threw them into the pools and then took up his water skin and filled it as the grass filtered the water. Britt pressed his canteen down into the matted, floating grasses.

“They call you the underwater people,” said Tissoyo. “You black skins.” He pinched up a fold of Britt’s skin on his forearm.

Britt stared at Tissoyo’s hand until he removed it. Then he asked, “Why are we underwater people?”

“When you lean over to look into the water your water-shadow is dark, like you are, and the one who is bending over the water is sur- prised.” Tissoyo stood up and gazed around himself in a casual and untroubled manner, and then bent over to look into the water at his dark shadow or reflection that appeared there, with rays of the sun lancing all around the shadow’s head like the halos of the Mexican saints. He pretended to gasp and jump back.

Then he turned to Britt with a theatrical gesture.

“You see.” He held out one hand as if introducing Britt to his underwater self.

Britt leaned over. His dark shadow looked up at him as if it had lain there in the pool of water all along, suspended in infinite time, waiting for him, to rise up now and glimmer on the surface as he bent over to it.

“Yes, there I am,” he said. “Interesting.” Britt lifted his full can- teen and it dripped on the stone. “So what do you call the people who are like me but they don’t have black skins?”

“Ah, the
taibo.
The Indian agent and soldiers and people who live in log houses and the Tejanos, and French and Spanish and all of them.” Tissoyo waved his hand toward the east.

“What does that mean?”

“Captive. It means captive. Sometimes it means a boy from the sun or soldiers. And so on.”

Britt drank from the canteen and screwed the cap on. He leaned over the water again to see his underwater self rise toward him in shadow with his head outlined in luminescent rays. He said, “There are fish there.” He bent to the surface. “That’s supper.”

Tissoyo made an elaborate gasping noise with indrawn breath. “Don’t touch them! You can make people angry like that. Eating fish.”

They stood into their stirrups and went on. The two spotted horses and the pack pony waded into the pools and drank their fill and then ran to catch up. Their wavering reflections disappeared into stone and then they were churning across the main stream. It was only breast-high on the horses. They splashed out the other side.

“What’s wrong with fish?”

“Something. I don’t know, but something.” Tissoyo waved one hand. His copper bracelets flashed. “We cannot eat them. It makes something become resentful. A being.”

Britt listened to the light jingle of his spurs in the stirrups and the lilt of the wind that never ceased on these high plains. It made Tissoyo’s hawk feathers move forward and then flatten as if they were making statements. A wind vane. Overhead, streaks of cir- rus clouds streamed, pure and seraphic. Before them a flat-headed misty bluff stood out where the Washita River had carved around a headland. Cajun’s step was steady and quick. His black mane lifted and fell.

“Why don’t you know?” Britt said.

“They all died. The people who knew died.” “What about the Kiowa?”

“Eh, the Kiowa will eat
anything.”

As they rode Tissoyo spoke of the death of all the old people when his father was young, from the sickness that had come with the wagons that were going west. The wagons were all full of men and they were anxious to get to someplace called Califor-

nia. The fever was a malediction that grew and spread and ate people. It was invisible in the plains air but slaughtered whole villages nonetheless. They lay down and died and rotted in their tipis and whoever could walk or get on a horse left them there. Once a small girl lived through the fever in one of those decaying tipis, alone among the dead. She walked out on the empty land and a man called Twisted Horn came upon her but did not know whether she was still inhabited by the hostile, acidic beings, and so he left food and blankets for her, and stayed by her at a distance for days until it was clear she was going to live and that the fever had left her. Then he took her up behind him. Her face was full of holes as if she had been shot with birdshot. She was now an old woman. She doesn’t remember the names of her mother and father. It was like f leshing a hide. Tissoyo made a sweeping mo- tion. All the people of that generation gone and raked off and f lung aside. When the sickness had passed over, less than half of the Comanche were left alive.

And so there were no old people left to tell the young men when to raid and when not to raid or even the reason for raiding. None to restrain them. The Comanche had no clans; the names and the structure of the clans had been disassembled and left behind in pieces when they ran from the California fever. The wagon fever. Anyone who remembered the names of clans or why we do not eat fish or dog had died. There was nothing to stop the young men from killing or to calm them. The Kiowa have a lot, they are rich. They all own a lot of songs, and they have a way of making counts of days and years, and some small manlike images. They have songs and year-counts and the little images and stories. They are rich with ritual and legend. They know the names of the beings that are stars. They have the story of their beginning. So we stay close to them, it is like being beside a good fire.

The people who survived forgot where it was we came from ex- cept it was said we came from far to the north and we know this because we speak like the Utes speak and they say they came from the other side of the Rocky Mountains many months of travel from

here. All they could do was fight and now every year we lose more and more young men in battles and so we diminish.

When all the people got sick and died, they say it was like the end of the world. A world with no Comanches in it. That would be evil. Without us to inhabit and think and to mourn for what was lost. For who we were. That would be evil.

Britt thought about this for a mile or so of steady walking and the loose horses flaunting their tails. They bit one another on the withers and once one of Tissoyo’s horses lay down to roll and so Britt turned Cajun and caught up the pack pony’s halter rope so that he would not lay down and roll as well, on top of the pack, and bust all his knots and rigging.

They came to a place not far from the Canadian where some people had thrown up their tipis in a snowstorm. Nothing goes un- marked or unrecorded in the dry air of the plains and the edges of the plains. Tracks and marks of habitation remain for decades, for centu- ries. Along streambeds, among the spiked crowns of yucca, long leaf- shaped flints eroded out of the soil and some of these flints had been made many thousands of years ago. But someone had made them, an individual like no other, who had a guardian spirit and a wife and children. And so with the immense bones of buffalo who were as high at the shoulder as a tipi, wolves as tall as a man. From time to time a person could find the lower jaws and skulls of these giant wolves lying open and hungry. They had been big enough to devour the man who made the flint in a few moments of gore and noise.

And so they easily found the circles made by people who had thrown up their tipis in a snowstorm last fall. Had stayed a week or so. Inside the circles the grass was shorter, unwatered, but at the edges it was much greener where heavy banks of snow had slid from the tipis and had given more moisture to the roots of the grasses.

“Were they the Kiowa with my wife and children?”

“I don’t know,” said Tissoyo. He walked around one circle. “The Kiowa use three main support poles for the tipis. We Comanche use four. But I can’t tell which marks were the support poles.” He bent down to touch a buffalo skull and then looked up and saw another.

“They were pointing the skulls toward the people,” he said. “To ask the buffalo to come. They were hungry. Very hungry.”

At night Britt and Tissoyo lay across the fire from each other and the horses ate their way through spring grasses with tearing sounds. From time to time one of the horses would snort an alarm and the rest would gather to him and then they would come close to the fire, shifting and nervous. Their eyes were lucent, glowing and deep in the firelight, as if they had some intense illuminations inside their skulls. Then Britt and Tissoyo sat up with rifles in hand and listened. The nighttimes were alive with distant noises, with disembodied beings, with great stars wheeling overhead.

They went on northwest on some trail that had been cut by the bison and also by people and horses. They came to the flat-topped Antelope Hills and then a few miles north of them, the Canadian River. They crossed the Canadian, gray as iron with spring rains, wide and shallow. When they passed a dry watercourse giving into the river, Britt saw something on the far side of it. He and Cajun scrambled up the bank, and he saw the remains of a child’s body. A skull with some patches of skin and hair on it, the spine a jointed white puzzle, the immature pelvis. He dismounted and reached down to the skull and saw that the hair was straight and black. Some child that had grown ill and weary and had been left behind, and the only children the Indians would leave behind would be cap- tive children, and this abandoned small creature was not his child. Someone’s child, but not his.

“Mexican,” said Tissoyo. “Maybe he was sick.” The Comanche lifted one hand and threw a braid over his shoulder. He took the other braid and bit the end of it. “The Texans and the Nemernah don’t think the same way about captives.”

“No, we don’t,” said Britt.

“You can get another wife,” said Tissoyo.

“She is my wife. Mine. I don’t want another one. They took what was mine and killed my son.” Britt’s hand tightened on the reins.

“Yes, yes, understood.” Tissoyo waved one hand anxiously. “But it is curious.”

“What is?”

“The Texans never stop until they get their women and children back. It makes them so angry they become like beasts, when you take their wives and children.”

“And also when you kill them,” said Britt. “Why do they take it so hard?”

“Just different,” said Britt. “Just different.”

by n o o n t i me a
great wind came up out of the northeast. It began with one hard gust that almost blew Britt’s hat from his head and then stopped and it was calm again but in another fifteen min- utes came another gust and then another and another. Then it blew straight and hard. The wind roared in their ears so they had to turn their heads to one another and shout. Tissoyo’s braids blew out be- hind him and his headdress writhed and fought to escape its pin- nings. After an hour or so Tissoyo pulled up.

“I smell fire.”

They saw it after they had traveled another five miles in the battering, glassy wind. First the smoke lifting on the horizon as if the whole world were afire and the tall rollers booming up and then bending in the wind toward them. Blossoms of ochre and gray that the sun shone through and turned blue on the edges. As they went on they saw at the bottom of this smoke the first appearance of flames, bright red and erratic, appearing and disappearing. The wind was in their faces and driving the fire toward them.

“We’d better get back to the river,” said Tissoyo. “We are in the path of it.”

It came on very fast. It boiled forward over many square miles of dried winter grasses and then they could see objects lifting in the air in the updrafts, limbs and flaunting webs of burning grasses. Before long the smoke covered the sky overhead. A running form flashed out of the fire and then three and four. Antelope bolted past with their little ears laid back and several fawns leaping behind them on knobby, angled legs.