The Nameless Dark: A Collection, page 31
“Without asking permission?”
“Water’s free, fella,” Biggs said, spitting in his general direction.
He fixed Biggs with a penetrating stare as his pupils dilated, blue melting to black. “Nothing is free, stranger.”
Biggs pulled his rifle from the saddle holster and slung it across his shoulders. “Ain’t very neighborly of ya, citizen. We the U-nited States now. Everyone ‘sposed to get along.”
The man cracked a weird smile. “Is that so?” The small paned windows all around us were now filled with pallid faces.
Biggs grinned, showing his rot to the sun. “Sure as shit is, ain’t it Cap?”
Pegging me for the leader, the man turned my direction. “What brings you here?”
“To be honest, we’re not rightly sure where here is. This place ain’t on any maps.” The man said nothing, so I got to the point. “We’re lookin’ for two Indians that passed this way. Big ones, would have looked rode hard.”
“Have not seen them.” The man spoke in a very proper but stilted way, with a tinge of an accent that was hard to place. Like he learned English later in life, knowing all the words, but not how to knit them together properly. Obviously an immigrant, as the prairie was full of them. But living in a town so obviously old…
Larsen said something in Danish. The man shot a look at him and narrowed his eyes. He barked a few words at Larsen before walking away.
“What did he say?” I asked
Larsen shrugged. “German, little bit. Think say…‘traitor.’” Larsen shrugged again.
I ambled my horse after the man. “Sir, we’re soldiers in the United States Army, on an official—”
The man spun around, his face suddenly animated. “Don’t bring your outer wars to this place!” he hissed, walking up to the horse, which whinnied and was about to bolt before I got her under control. The man stood just below me, but seemed to tower face to face. “You don’t belong here.”
“Do them two Injun we be chasin’ belong here?” Jefferson called from behind us.
The man turned to Jefferson, his face reforming into a placid mask. “No, they do not.” He folded his mouth into a smile, a horrible expression that looked unnatural over that oblong skull. He raised his long arm and pointed right at Jefferson. “But you might.”
The man started to laugh, a dry, raspy sound that set my teeth on edge, and did a little jig with his feet. I don’t know what Jefferson thought, but he turned his horse and charged as fast as those four legs would take him out of town. The rest of us followed, trailed by the wheezing laughter of the gangly man, dancing on the stones. “But you might!” he trilled in a falsetto that echoed off the dead prairie.
We were a mile out of the unnamed town before we caught up to Jefferson, who jumped off his nag mid gallop, tumbled and skidded on the balls of his hands, vomiting into the grass before he came to a stop. We positioned our horses around him, staring down as he heaved everything inside of him into his bleeding, shaking palms. For once, even Biggs had nothing to say, looking as haunted as everyone else in the group.
I dismounted and went to Jefferson. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I seen that man before…”
“What, I don’t—”
Jefferson jerked his face up at me, lips covered in bile, terror in his bulging eyes that looked big as milk saucers with two black marbles quivering in the middle of each. “I seen him in my dreams!”
The sun was starting to set, and I figured we’d ridden enough for the day and everyone was pretty spent from the queer happenings. We made camp on a high ridge plateau, marked by the thick arms of a squatty bur oak, giving us a view of the town. No lights came from the houses or buildings, letting the night swallow up the frontier community as the sun died behind us in the west.
I posted a guard and allowed a fire, as I knew that they knew where we were, so no sense in trying to hide. Problem was, I didn’t know who “they” were anymore.
That night, as I prayed for sleep like I always did, I thought I heard bells tinkling over the prairie. Bells that sounded dented and off-key, yet delicate. The insects stopped their droning song, listening as I was, waiting with me. All was still.
I looked out into the dark for what seemed like an age, trying to pry apart the blackness to see what I knew what was out there. Finally, the dance of bells filtered into the camp, louder this time, tying me fast to my bedroll with each discordant note. Unable to move, the ghostly outline of tall, wiry figures topped by antlers stepped lightly just outside the firelight of my waking mind as it reached to tear the veil. The figures carried rough-hewn boards over their shoulders, bells dangling from each end. Others dragged great beasts lashed to stretchers of fresh cut branches. Aquatic creatures, trailing oozing tentacles, slicking the flattened grass with a slimy ink. They were heading to higher ground for a gathering. Prepping for a feast. A mass.
I tried to blink, but my eyes were closed. This was the creep of Flatland Madness. I wished for my wife. I wished for whiskey. I wished for a bullet to my brainpan if it meant rest and an end to the feeling of dread that was pinning me to this cold, hard ground. I didn’t want anything to do with the ghosts of the prairie, just like they didn’t want anything to do with me. We didn’t fit, and this unnatural pairing was ripping me asunder without bothering to make a starting wound. Some earthly places weren’t made for living things, at least the way we knew life to be. But man is an arrogant ape, and so here we are, disturbing the Old Ways, while bashing out the brains of every fellow human being that doesn’t look exactly like us, or bow to the same flag, sing to the same savior. Ridiculous, arrogant ape, swinging a club like a demigod.
The jangle of bells faded away, and my mind went with it, leaving something hollow behind, which draped itself in black.
In the morning, Ebke was gone, and Jefferson was dead.
I recount these occurrences in this order, because I don’t rightly think Ebke was the cause of the latter, but I somehow think he was active in the former, and without much prodding. All of us were spooked. He was the one who deserted. At least that was what I thought at the time. I feel much differently now, knowing what I know. We all should have left, and headed back to Fort Robison, reporting a failed mission, and getting back to our dreary routine. At least that made sense, as shame was better than what was waiting for us. We all should have left…. The foresight of cowardice, versus the ignorance of courage.
Sam shook me awake, his copper face hard as granite. I wasn’t sure that I had even slept, as I remember the sky starting to lighten as I lay frozen, waiting to be dragged off to the top of an ancient bluff, the sound of distant drums joined with the frantic beating of my traitorous heart. I felt like I awakened from a long hibernation that had absolutely zero to do with sleep. Sam’s eyes told me nothing. They stopped doing that a few days back.
I walked over to the shade of the stunted oak and stood next to Larsen, who was looking at the pair of purpled, swollen feet swinging gently in the breeze, already drawing flies. Jefferson’s boots were gone. He died without them. Whittle sat in the grass nearby, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking forward and back, muttering to himself.
“Holy shitfire! Whittle kilt the nigger!” Biggs sat up in his bedroll, wide yellowed eyes going back and forth from the accused to the side of meat that was Jefferson.
“I ain’t killed shit,” Whittle mumbled into his sleeves, so quiet that it screamed the truth.
“Ebke,” Larsen said. His cheeks were flushed, hands gripping at nothing.
“Ebke couldn’t take down that black buck,” Biggs said, scrambling to his feet and circling Jefferson’s body. “If it weren’t Whittle, it were them Injuns. You said it yourself, Cap. They been gamin’ us. Prolly waited ‘til we bedded down, then snuck in, strung up Jefferson, and took Ebke with ‘em for brefess. Prolly got a sign from ol’ Sam here.” Biggs unsheathed his knife. “Right, Sammy boy? You send up them smoke signals to yer kinfolk last night?”
“It was them townspeople,” Whittle said. “They spooked Jefferson somethin’ fierce… Set me off my feed a little bit, too.”
I remembered Jefferson’s terrified face and felt the short hairs on my neck stand on end. “You see anything last night?”
“No,” Sam said, his lip quivering, maybe out of grief for Jefferson, but more than likely out of embarrassment that someone snuck into camp and did their business while the proud Lakota brave had his guard down. Sugar and wool were making him soft.
“Ebke had last watch,” I said. “Maybe he killed Jefferson then run off.”
“No,” Sam repeated, then unsheathed his Bowie knife, long as a child’s forearm, causing Biggs to stumble backwards. Sam walked up to Jefferson and pointed up to his swollen face, the coffee bean brown of his skin pushed out smooth by the gathered fluid underneath. “No fight.”
I examined Jefferson’s body, looking at his hands. “Ain’t a mark on him.”
Sam nodded.
“Close ol’ eight ball’s eye, could ya?” Biggs said with a grimace, staring at the yellowing sack bulging from Jefferson’s face. His other socket was hollow and clotted with blood, awaiting the maggots. “Givin’ me the heeby jeebs.”
We broke camp and planned on heading back to that queer town, in hopes of contacting Fort Robinson and sending back Jefferson’s remains, if they had any sort of freight service. We couldn’t stop our mission, not now, and I wasn’t going to bury Jefferson out on the prairie, for the coyotes and beetles and whatever killed him in the first place to take him any lower in death than he had been in life. He’d been through enough. His family would get his body, and give him the good Christian burial of a free citizen. It was the least I could do for a good man.
Larsen and I wrapped Jefferson’s body in his bedding, and lashed him near the rump of his horse. In this heat, he’d start to turn something fierce in a few days, so I was hoping we could get him couriered back to Robinson while we caught up to these murdering Indians and finished what we started. Something told me that we were nearing the end of the game, and the time was past nigh to start playing for keeps. This chase needed to turn back into a hunt.
We found our trail through the grass that lead us back to the town, but as we followed it, it seemed to just take us in a circle, and we eventually ended up back near our campsite from the night before. The town seemed to have vanished. This didn’t make any kind of logical sense, and as Whittle and Biggs started to jaw about all sorts of superstitious nonsense, the circle of turkey vultures that seemed to materialize out of the pale blue to the east drew everyone’s eyes to the sky, tracking the lazy twirl of a half dozen shallow V’s. I didn’t even look at Sam. I knew there wouldn’t be a point. He’d changed, as we all had. The prairie had taken something out of us, while putting something between us. Instead of seeking the counsel of my friend, I just took off after Biggs, who had charged ahead toward the locus of the world’s loosest, slowest tornado, his unfastened gear scattering behind him.
The vultures brought us to a sticky red trail that just appeared out of nowhere, as if it touched down from the clouds. We followed the trace and found parts of Ebke, left like breadcrumbs. Chunks of meat here and there, bits of bone, but always staying on that straight red line carved down deep into the buffalo grass.
After dragging our protesting horses a quarter mile, we came across what remained of Ebke hanging from a wooden X made of unfinished planks, buried into a slight depression in the ground near the bottom of a draw, like a shallow basin servicing a drainage groove. A collection bowl. Ebke’s privates were modestly covered in a swaddling knitted of his own intestines, which also wrapped the top of his head like a crown. I expected to find bells attached to the wood, but there were none.
Biggs was already there when the rest of the party arrived, sitting on his knees, cursing through the strings of snot swinging down over his chin. “Look at this shit…” Biggs sobbed, pulling at his face while his eyes took in the full view of Ebke’s limbless torso, and the parts of him hanging from the planks like gruesome Christmas ornaments. He turned to me. “Look at this shit!”
I dismounted and didn’t move any closer. Whittle vomited in the grass, while Larsen wiped away tears. Sam seemed far away, even though he was within arms’ reach.
“What’re we doin’ out here anyway, huh?” Biggs continued, rising to his feet and pacing. “Fuck these Injuns, fuck all y’all. Let’s get the hell out of here, Cap! Say we couldn’t find shit. Reds be like worms, disappearin’ inta the ground. They’d believe us. They’d believe you!”
I tore my gaze away from that bloody X and remembered my station, my duty. “We’re out here to accomplish our mission,” I said, regaining my stomach, trying to sound stern, even as I was starting to doubt the sanity of any hostile action taken in this godless land of nightmares and blood and an endless green that blanketed this land like a death shroud. “We do that, we can go home.”
“That stinkin’ fort ain’t my home.” Biggs mounted up. “I ain’t endin’ up like Ebke. I ain’t endin’ up like any y’all. I’m hightailin’ it to Missourah and gettin’ the fuck outta Nebraska. My momma warned me…” He cinched up his saddle. “Y’all Yankees can kiss my rebel ass and eat my d—”
The pistols were in my hands before that filthy mouth could finish. Hammers drew back with a double click. “You desert, you die.” The horseflies buzzing loudly around the remains of Ebke seemed to undercut my point.
Biggs laughed, his eyes wild. “I stay here, I’m dead anyways!”
“You head out by yourself, you’ll die faster. And you’ll die alone.”
Biggs ran through this scenario so quickly it looked like a vein popped right above his temple, where the mange had shanghaied his hair. “Fuck you!” He turned to Sam. “Fuck you, and all yer kind!”
Sam smiled. It was a fearsome sight. “Now think like we do…” Sam grabbed Biggs by the ankle. “…’bout you.”
Biggs kicked away Sam’s hand. “Fucking savages, all ya’s.” Biggs was ranting, limbs flailing, his horse skittering underneath him as my pistols followed. But he didn’t leave. He wasn’t gonna call my bluff, because there wasn’t a damn bit of bluff in what I had waiting for him inside those two smokers. “How could y’all do somethin’ like this?”
“Your people do worse,” Sam said, approaching the body.
“Oh yeah? Then why’s you with us, huh? Our people is your people now, and don’t you forget that shit.”
Sam examined the state of the dismembered body. “My people no do this.”
“Who did it, then? The coyotes? The mother fucking prairie chickens?”
Sam said something in his native language. I looked at him, hoping he’d translate. He didn’t, until my glare forced him to bunch up his lips, searching for the right words in English. He got close enough. “Other People.”
“Them townspeople.”
Sam started to laugh. I looked at him. I’d never seen him laugh, but there he sat, high in his saddle, roaring like a loon.
A humming mass buzzed past my ear, followed by the sound of punctured meat. Larsen wheezed and crumpled as the crack of a rifle shot reached us, echoing off the ridges and up from the brambled draws.
“There they is,!” Biggs screamed. We followed his jabbed finger to the two riders on a bluff a hundred yards to our right. Always above us, always too many steps ahead to count. One of them - the shooter, no doubt - was rearing back on his mount, thunder stick held high, long hair whipping against the horizon, like he was posing for the cover of one of those Frank Starr dime novels. The image was beautiful and terrifying. Majestic. These lands were their lands, and we were just clumsy boars, rooting up holes and laying poison seed all over this prairie that didn’t want a thing from us, and would kill us to keep it that way.
Sam took a shot back at them, and they seemed to sidestep the bullet like it was swimming through molasses. Laughter arose from the duo, followed by a string of what could only be counted as Lakota insults, judging by the hardening of Sam’s jaw.
“You missed on purpose,” Biggs said, taking a hasty plug of his own. He was a lousy shot. A lousier soldier. I wished Jefferson was at my side instead of rotting over the back of a jittery horse. Without him, down Ebke, and Sam burrowed deep into his own reservation… Goddamn.
The two riders dug their heels into ribs and charged down the hill toward us. Whittle tried to load a cartridge, but fumbled and dropped his gun. The butt hit the ground and fired low, blowing a hole into the sod under hoof and throwing him from his horse. He landed in a heap next to Larsen, his face so close that he could hear the last breath the farm boy took as his eyes locked into a surprised expression—a postcard from the Great Beyond. Whittle moaned and crawled to his feet.
The two Indians kept coming, cocking their old Henry rimfires. Heavier guns than ours. More accurate, too, even mid-gallop with a belly full of freedom. Sam threw off his woolen jacket, ripped open his uniform, and unsheathed his knife, going AWOL without taking a step. His papers said U.S. Army, but his heart was branded in a language older than figures scratched on parchment. Primitive as death, in communion with things civilized progress was in a hurry to forget.
I took aim at the lead rider, and prayed to the Christian God that my worried slug found purchase. I measured high, right at those bared teeth, calculating that the drop of the land and the weight of my bullet would take my shot right into that broad, painted chest. Salt water on the grass… Horned figures… Tentacles… The cackle of the gaunt man dancing over the smoothed stones…
I pulled the trigger, when I should have squeezed. The stock dug into my shoulder, filling in the space that nerves left loose, and heat spit back into my face. I rubbed my eyes and saw the riders had separated just before my shot, and were circling back up the hill.
“Let’s ride,” I hollered, chambering another round. All I could do at this point was give loud, empty orders, because nothing else meant shit anymore.
