The Color of Lightning (21 page)

They turned and went at a run for the Canadian behind them. The hot, smoking wind was at their backs. Britt’s arm was nearly jerked out of its socket as he hauled at the pack pony’s lead rope until it finally broke into a gallop. That distance seemed very long. He heard behind them a sucking, roaring sound. Before they rode down onto the sandy flats Tissoyo jumped off his horse and handed Britt his reins.

Tissoyo sat down on his haunches and gathered a pile of grass. With his thickened, muscled hands he ripped a dead agarita from the ground. He ignored the tiny thorns. He threw this on the pile of grass and mashed it into a ball. He tied his rope around it. Then he took up his flint and steel and struck a shower of sparks into the pile while loose strands of his black hair streamed out around his head in the searing wind. The packed ball of grass caught fire. The wind took up the two small heads of flame within it like a transparent magician, a dextrous invisible being, and sucked fire out of it. Tissoyo vaulted onto his buckskin. Fire leaped to the grass alongside as Tissoyo rode dragging the ball behind him. Then he threw the flaming ball into the stands of dry bluestem. The fire caught and ran sideways and then toward the water. They rode out onto the white sands of the Canadian River and the porous sandstone flats that clicked beneath their horses’ hooves. The backfire spread and ate the dry grass along the bank and the smoke rolled into their faces.

Britt pulled the pack off the pony in case he could not hold him and then they would lose all that was in the pack. The ransom money and gifts, his ammunition and what supplies remained to him. He threw the pack onto a layer of sandstone that looked like petrified broadcloth and soaked a blanket and threw it over the pack and the ammunition inside it. He hobbled the pony and then Cajun, and wet his second blanket and threw it over Cajun and the saddle. He turned to help Tissoyo.

The two paint horses trembled in waves all over their bodies as they stood staring at the darkening sky and there was white around their eyes. Their tails blew between their legs and their manes stood out ahead of them.

“Throw them down,” said Britt. “Blindfold them. They’ll run.” Tissoyo roped both of the spotted ponies and then tied up a fore-

foot on the Medicine Hat paint, so that he stood, three-legged and helpless. Then he laid a loop around the other forefoot and jerked him down on his front end and then they did the same with the black-and-white mare, and blindfolded both of them. Tissoyo wet his blankets and draped them sticky and soaked over the paints.

The backfire had now burned along the north bank of the river and died out, leaving a landscape in the negative. Here and there a stand of big bluestem still burned like a handful of crisp red signal flags. The main fire came on and with it the smell of cooking meat and sulphur. Britt and Tissoyo soaked their neckerchiefs in the wa- ter and tied them over their faces. They lay down in the stone pools of the riverbed. The smoke came upon them with a killing chemical smell, carrying in itself the gases of some remote burning coal bank and seared flats of cactus. Cajun stood steady with his blindfolded head down and his skin shivered as sparks fell on him.

It grew very dark. Vagrant sheets of fire blew into the air like burning laundry and disappeared. Other flames crawled low to the earth and roared when they fell upon fresh fuel. Sparks shot forward out of incandescent green brush whose stems were full of spring sap. In the middle of the hottest flames long thin ropes of fire tornados moved, bright pink and alive.

The fire stopped at the edge of the backfire but the smoke came on. Sparks cascaded down on them. Britt beat them out and they left black holes in his coat. Tissoyo had dipped his head in the wa- ter. Britt could smell the scent of burning flesh and closed his eyes.
Don’t let me come this far and hope and have Mary and the children die in this.

Long streamers of fire leapt the river. Britt glanced up and it was like shimmering red silk vibrating over his head. It jumped to the grass and brush on the far bank and flashed into a brief inferno and ate everything there was to eat, burned everything there was to burn, and then on the back of the windstorm it roared on.

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waited until the following day to move. It was blowing a hard wind yet. The earth ahead of them would be hot and full of glowing small cinders of burned brush. They took the blindfolds and ropes off the spotted horses; they struggled up to drink and then Britt and Tissoyo slept on the stone of the river- bank that night. The water was thick and dark. The next morning they strained it through their dirty handkerchiefs and then went on, walking and leading the horses. They had to get through the burned area to find grass. If they did not get through the burned area the two loose horses would begin to range for grazing and be lost.

They passed smoking carcasses of antelope and the charred bod- ies of two wolves lying with their tongues sticking roasted and fleshy out of their mouths. They passed a raised, bumpy area that had been a prairie dog town. The small creatures lay dead in their entrance holes where the fire had sucked the air out of their tunnels and they had crawled up to breathe and died in the burning. A blackened armadillo looked like a Dutch oven someone had abandoned.

By the end of the day they had not reached the farther limit of the fire. They and the horses walked on with black and ashy legs. A cold front came down on them, out of the north, a hard spring chill in a transparent wind and a cloudless sky. It blew Britt’s coat open and he had to grasp his hat to his head.

They were black to the knees and clouds of ashes like a charcoal mist blew along the ground. Britt strode forward like a machine, his head down against the wind and the haze of ashes rising around his feet. Ahead was a low draw. He and Tissoyo and the horses headed down it and stumbled over the broken plates of yellow sandstone. Up on one side they saw the shallow protection of a long cave. They scrambled up and into it, out of the wind. They let the horses go. Above the cave, in a ledge of stone, a thin seam of coal had caught fire. The seam was in round deposits, each the size of a fist. It ran all along one layer of limestone like a string of beads and each bolus burned fitfully with a blue flame.

Chapter 16
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some time later. The horses were gone. Tissoyo lay facedown at one side of the cave. A great pain in Britt’s head shot all around his skull and burned behind his eyes. He was very weak. Britt pulled himself forward through the dirt and rocks of the cave floor until he was beside Tissoyo and then managed to roll himself over the edge. He fell down several layers of stone and boulders and through a stabbing yucca and came to rest in a sandy fan where water poured when it rained. He began to breathe slowly and deeply. His eyes burned. It seemed to be the middle of the day. The northern wind was still blowing and cold and a mist of ashes sailed and snaked like ropes above them still. A translucent daytime moon looked down on him from the blue sky with an as-

tonished face. He felt very sick. It was the coal fumes.

Britt shifted his long body until he was sat upright. There seemed to be so much of him, terminating in weighty, unman- ageable hands and large feet encased in blackened boots the color of cast iron. The coal gas was drifting downward; coal gas was heavier than air and it had soaked their lungs and blood all night. It was a miracle he had awakened. Some driving, alert part of his

mind had reached through the coma and shook him and said
You must live, you must.

He turned over onto his hands and knees and began to crawl slowly back up the slope. In a clumsy motion of his hand he turned over a rock. The scorpion beneath it whipped up its thin tail and stung him on the heel of his thumb. Britt smashed it with a rock and felt the deep pain rocketing up his arm and shoulder and this drove him on, it wakened him and made him angry. He placed his large unwieldy hands flat on the broken stones and dragged his heavy feet after him over the rock and at last reached the cave. He bent his head and took a deep breath of air and then closed his mouth and laid his scorpion-stung hand on Tissoyo’s tangled, ashy hair. He closed his hand tight and then fell backward. He dragged Tissoyo over the lip of rock and they fell over each other until they came to rest in the sand and stones at the bottom of the draw.

The wind howled. Britt’s head hurt so badly he felt as if fire were shooting out of his eyes. He was torn by thirst. With his thumb he lifted Tissoyo’s left eyelid and with the other forefinger, touched the eyeball and Tissoyo blinked.

Then the Comanche’s lips moved and his head turned one way and then the other. Britt fell back and clasped his stung hand to his chest. He lay there for a few moments.

He sat up, slowly, and tried to call his horses. No sound came out. His mouth and lips were so dry they stuck together. His tongue was as big as a bolster. He pulled his knife out of the scabbard and slashed a wound on the back of his wrist, and lifted it to his mouth as if it were a chalice and took the blood into his mouth and swal- lowed. He wiped his lips on his shirtsleeve. He lifted his head and called “Come boys!” He called several times and then fell back again. Tissoyo did not move.

After a while Britt heard a horse’s steel shoes clicking up the draw toward him. It was Cajun. Lost and hungry and thirsty and without anything to eat in a world of drifting ash.

Britt got to his feet and walked slowly toward Cajun. Once he crossed one foot in front of another but recovered. He pulled the

canteen off the saddle horn and drank and drank. Cajun smelled the water and pushed him with his nose.

Britt carried the canteen back to Tissoyo and poured water on his face. Tissoyo’s hands reached up for the water with a Comanche word. He opened his eyes and drank the rest of the water. Then he leaned forward and threw up the water and the pemmican he had eaten and then green acid slime. It shot out of him, over his thighs, and ran off the buckskin in rivulets.

Britt stood up and said, “Wait. I will come back.”

His voice was better now that he had drunk half the canteen. He went off down the draw with Cajun’s reins in his hand. Where the draw fed out to a wide wash he found the pack pony with the pack off to one side, standing braced against the weight of it, and the two spotted horses. The fire had jumped the wash and left patches of stiff inedible bear grass and sotol. Even so the horses ripped at it. They saw him and called anxiously.

Britt got Tissoyo and himself mounted and the pack straightened on the pony. They started out across the burned country. Tissoyo fell forward from time to time and sank both hands in his buckskin horse’s mane and then straightened and then slumped backward and caught himself again.

On a rise Britt saw ahead a horizon of shifting grass, the tossing new leaves of cottonwoods floating and lifting over some water- course. As they went on toward it they passed the place where the fire had begun; a great spiked flash of black, the earth exposed, where lightning had struck.

That night they ate the rest of the pemmican and four pilot bis- cuits. The water lay in shallow pools but it was enough. The horses stayed near them to graze and search out the buffalo grass where it sprang up in tight curls under the winter bluestem.

Tissoyo’s head fell forward into both hands. He was silent for a long time. He was crying without noise. Britt watched him. His head still hurt and when he moved too quickly he saw the cotton- woods ambulating in a queasy and uncertain way. He wondered if

the coal fumes might have damaged Tissoyo’s mind. Britt held out the canteen.

Tissoyo drank and drank and then wiped his face, his eyes and nose.

“Now I have to give you the horses. They are the best horses I ever owned. They are so beautiful.” Tissoyo’s voice was thready.

Britt raised his head. “Why do you have to give them to me?” “For my life.”

“Hm.” Britt watched him in the firelight as Tissoyo pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

“I love them,” said Tissoyo.

“But you owe them to me.” Britt clasped his hands together and leaned back on one elbow. This was a new development and it was very interesting and he did not want to interrupt Tissoyo’s train of thought.

“Yes. Otherwise a being would be offended. Somebody has al- ready sent down the fire. Because of the fish.”

“But I didn’t catch any fish.”

“But you spoke about it where they could hear you. It could get worse.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Oh, yes. Much worse.” Tissoyo wiped his hands on his buck- skins.

Yes,
thought Britt.
I could shoot you and take them.

Tissoyo looked up at him suddenly and his eyes narrowed. “You could have left me to die and taken the horses. Or shot me and then taken them anyway.”

Britt nodded. Despite his long day of ash and smoke he groped in the pocket of his burned coat and brought out his tobacco and squares of newspaper and rolled a cigarette. The heel of his thumb still burned from the scorpion sting and a hard, round knot had formed with a tiny red dot in the middle of it. He would have given a great deal for a drink of Paint Crawford’s acidic mustang-grape wine.

“I need you,” said Britt. “To help me with the Kiowa.”

“Ahuh.” Tissoyo lifted his hands to his head. “My brain is burn- ing.”

“But it seems to me to be true. You have to give me your horses. I gave you your life when I could have left you, or I could have taken it.” Britt leaned back and smoked and regarded Tissoyo out of his long black eyes.

Tissoyo nodded. It was as if he had lost at gambling with the red-and-blue sticks. He had lost and there was a debt to pay.

“I love them,” he said. “They are the most beautiful horses I ever owned.”

“I will trade them to the Kiowa for my wife and children and whoever else they have captive,” said Britt. “Then you go and steal them back.”

“But we are friends and brothers, the Comanche and the Kiowa. I can’t do that. We raid together and make war together. It can’t be done.”