The Color of Lightning (22 page)

“I have underwater power,” said Britt. “That is how I woke up when you were still asleep in the coal gas.”

“Ah.” Tissoyo lifted his head. “So one would think.” He turned his head to the jumping campfire. A cedar root had grown in a tight circle so that the fire poured out of its ring. “I wondered.”

Mucho poder,
said Britt. He gave the Spanish words a soft and urgent sound.
Un poder suave como la seda, como seda obscura cuando lo veas bajo del agua. Un poder que tienen tambien los seres que viven allí abajo en el agua.

Tissoyo clapped both hands over his ears. “I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “Be quiet.”

Tissoyo drank more water and poured it on his face despite the cold and then wrapped up in his fragmented, burned blankets and fell asleep.

th e n e x t m o r n i n g
they found the horses in a draw where two hackberry trees grew, and a stand of horseweed where they stood

eating the tender shoots so rapidly Britt saw Cajun rip off ten bites before he stopped to chew. The Medicine Hat was black to the knees of his white legs and there were thin black marks on his hips where he had whipped his ashy tail. They loved horseweed, they would eat it even when the leaves were dried and rusty on the tall stalks, and here it curled up new and green. Britt and Tissoyo stayed there the day to let the horses finish the patch. They lay in the sun and slept like dead men. Then they got up and drank more water and slept again. From time to time Tissoyo counted in some language, pressing his forefinger to the fingertips of his other hand. He said that the Kiowa counted in strange ways and he was practicing. Also he wanted to see if his brains were right. Then they slept again and all the long cold night and in the morning saddled up and went on.

They had crossed the Red Rolling Plains, always moving north- west, until they had come to a broken country on the north fork of the Cimarron River where mesas rose up and were topped with black lava. They had ridden gradually, level by level, into a high country that had mesas and cones of hills and granite so tumbled into rockslides and standing columns it seemed the rock was still in movement. The nights were colder and the air sharper, thinner. Streams and watercourses ran snaking between the low mesas. The grasses were different, and Britt saw around him rapid, tilting flocks of birds with rosy heads and yellow stripes in their tails. There were marks where black bears had clawed the short oaks, plum trees with the fruit still small and green ripening on branches. Tissoyo said they were near the
estado
of Colorado, what the
taibo
called Colorado.

“And so what is an
estado
?” said Tissoyo.

“A place, the name of a place.”

Tissoyo nodded. “There is supposed to be a line nobody can see.” “That’s right.”

Tissoyo was impatient with this. “How do they make a line if it can’t be seen?”

Britt thought for a moment. It was a good question. “I think they mark it down on paper. It’s only on the paper.”

“You never know what the
taibo
will think of.”

They came upon a marked trail where people had crossed the Cimarron. Tissoyo rode up and down along the wide trail of unshod hoofprints, and the sinuous grooves travois poles had made in the dirt, and the deeper cuts of wheels.

“This is them,” said Tissoyo. “See, here is Old Man Komah’s
carreta
wheel marks. This off to the side, this is Aperian Crow’s best horse. That horse has big round feet like buckets. I wanted him but Aperian Crow wouldn’t trade.”

Fan-shaped streams of dust that had blown off the sharp edges of the prints. The remains of shattered rib bones that had been thrown to the dogs and that the dogs had carried along for a little while, a lost hair slide, desiccated human waste, torn brush.

“They would be here, in the Black Mesa country,” said Tissoyo. “This is a good place to get out of the wind and there is plenty of grazing.”

They left the horses at the bottom of a steep, broken slope of red granite and eroded lava and climbed to the top. It was like the Wichita Mountains. Old volcanoes now quiet that had poured their lava over a granite landscape, standing up out of nowhere. Britt’s hard-soled boots slipped on the stone and he hauled himself up by grasping cedar branches and dwarf oak trees. At the top they lay down on a shelf of red granite in order not to outline themselves against the sky. They could see a long way. In the remote distance to the west the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico and the cone of the Capulin volcano. And beyond them were the Mexican settlements, Santa Fe and San Idlefonso.

“There.” Tissoyo lifted his head and stuck out his lower lip.

They lay on their elbows and watched the rising columns of campfire smoke. The smoke stood up in the windless air like flag- staffs. Somewhere would be men watching, as they were. They might have already been seen. His wife and children might be there alive, or they might not be.

“We must be prepared,” Tissoyo said. He turned and ran low and then slid and scrambled back down to where they had tied the horses. Britt followed.

“For what?”

Tissoyo mounted and he turned his buckskin horse back toward the river.

“The Kiowa like to look good,” he said. “We have to bargain with them. They are offended by dirty people. We are all burned and dirty.”

At the river Tissoyo and Britt pulled off the saddles and stood their horses in the stream and raked their backs with wet handsful of wadded grasses. Cajun made a low sound of pleasure and then shook himself. Then they stripped and washed themselves and their clothes. Tissoyo was suddenly busy and purposeful, he was alive and delighted. There was intrigue ahead and trickery and a lot of talk and one had to be both beautiful and cunning. Then there had to be elaborate braiding and wrapping of braids. He polished his brass-button earrings and his copper bracelets. He broke out yucca root and beat it with a stone until a thin foam appeared in the fibers. They used this for soap, and Tissoyo scrubbed his head with both hands until the saponin left his hair shining. Britt let his clothes dry on the bank and sat naked and rolled a cigarette.

“How do we go up to them?” he said. “Should we make a white flag?”

“No.” Tissoyo’s head was still covered in suds. He spat. “First the lookouts will see us. We hold out both hands. I call out to them in Kiowa. I say we are friends.” He stood up and the suds rolled down his long copper-colored body. He threw out both hands. “ ‘Friend!’ I say. ‘Comanche!’ I say. And then I say, ‘This man is also a friend!’ And then they come riding up looking, looking . . .” Tissoyo stared narrow-eyed on all sides, bent over, suspicious. “To see if some people are behind us, lying in ambush. But no!” He straightened up and slapped yucca suds under his armpits and scrubbed. “No one in ambush. And I say, ‘Tell Ape- rian Crow and Satanta and Satank and First Wolf and whatever headmen are here that here is coming Tissoyo with a man who is an underwater man.’ They will already have sent all the captives off into hiding.”

He fell straight backward into the shallow water and came up squinting and spitting and then fell backward again until he was rinsed off. He sat waist-deep in the water and wiped his eyes.

“They will say so much this and so much that for the captives. Well, then, you agree. Then they bring to you only one captive. They say, ‘Now for the rest, we want more.’ They do this all the time. They have always done that.”

“I will tell them that I offer one price and I am sticking to it,” said Britt.

“Yes, but they know how badly you people want your wives and children back. They know you will agree to increasing the price. And they will increase it for every captive.” Tissoyo came splashing out of the water.

“We’ll see.”

“They already know why we are here. We don’t have to tell them anything. First we eat, and then we start bargaining.” He stood up and wiped water from himself, and his face was sober. “With my horses. But they are your horses now.”

“I need them,” said Britt.

“It is all right. I am still alive. You pulled me out of the coal fumes.”

“You will get something for doing this,” said Britt.

“It is whatever you think.” Tissoyo pressed his lips together. He waved away Britt’s words. “It doesn’t matter.”

“If I get back my wife and children someday I will see you have a horse as beautiful as the Medicine Hat.”

“If I live,” said Tissoyo. “Maybe someday.”

w h e n br i t t a n d
Tissoyo rode in, the headmen of the camp were already wearing their best jewelry. Women pushed burning ends of wood farther into the fire to keep a large brass kettle on the boil, and from another fire rose the smell of roasting meat and burning feathers. They were cooking trumpeter swans and grouse breasts packed in clay. The long flexible necks and black bills of the

trumpeters lay in a heap to one side. A woman took up a grouse and held it by the feet, made a quick shaking motion to make the wings flap open. Then she held it to the ground and placed a foot on each wing and pulled upward and the feet and breasts came away from the rest of the body. She laid this on a grill of green sticks over the fire. A child threw the remains into the air, the back and wings and head. A dog caught it in mid-leap.

Britt watched as a Kiowa man across from him took up the wing feathers of a swan like a handle and ate the roasted arm muscle. Britt did the same. The Kiowa language sang in its vari- able tones between Tissoyo and the men across from them. As Tissoyo spoke, he laid down the grouse breast and sat straight and was grave and restrained. He augmented his faulty Kiowa with sign language in gestures made close to his chest and from time to time fell into Spanish. Britt understood that they were speaking of the prairie fire, of the f lights of trumpeters skidding down onto ponds and lakes to rest in their northward migrations, of another group of Kiowa who had split off and gone north. One man among them appeared to be Mexican or half Mexican; he wore a broad- brimmed hat and a serape in a design of vibrating colors. He wore trousers and suspenders.

Britt wiped his hands on his shirt and turned to Tissoyo. “Ask him if they are all alive, and where are they?”

“That is not a good way to start,” said Tissoyo. He sat very still and Britt saw a little nervous movement of his head. But after a mo- ment’s exchange he turned to Britt and said, “Yes, your wife and two children are alive and they are here. But the little girl called Mill-ee is dead. They call her Sain-to-odii. She went on north with some others and then died from some sickness.”

Britt lowered his head and stared at two or three vagrant breast feathers lifting in the slight breeze and the currents of heat from the fire. For several days now he had been thinking of how to bargain from a position of strength, and that could only mean indifference. He did not look about the camp for his wife and children. His hands rested on his kneecaps.

“Tell him I have another wife. It is not allowed among the Teja- nos or Americans or French or Spanish but we underwater people can have several wives and I have another wife to look after.”

He waited while Tissoyo repeated this, in fragments of sign lan- guage and Kiowa and Spanish.

“And that if my first wife, this one you have, is happy here then she can stay. And the children too.”

Aperian Crow stared at Britt for a moment.
Then why did you come so far to look for them?

“I am looking for the trails that lead from the Texas country to Santa Fe. I will have a wagon made and I will carry trade goods with the Comancheros. And so since I came close to your camp I stopped to ask about them.”

Tissoyo repeated their statements back and forth with a perfectly flat look, in a kind of language hypnosis, both hands lifted and oc- casionally making sign. Britt tried to eat heartily of what was before him but his throat shut up like a bag tied with string. His wife and children were somewhere nearby, and he was afraid for what they might have become.

Chapter 17
‌

W

T

he ou t p os t s h a d
seen them ten miles away. Mary knew that Britt had come, that somebody had come, because she and

her children were taken away and hidden in a hollow place behind a shelf of stone above the camp. The outposts had known for a long time; little Millie had been sent away a week ago. Gonkon sat in the stone hollow with Mary and Jube and Cherry. There were two young men to guard them.

Mary rested her back against a red granite rock. Jube and Cherry beside her. If they were to be killed there would be some sort of sig- nal first, and she would watch for it, and then protect the children until she was dead.

From the hiding place Gonkon could hear the men talking. She turned to Mary and Jube and Cherry.

“He doesn’t want you,” she said. Gonkon had a haughty expres- sion because she was afraid they would find Sain-to-odii and take the girl from her. She was so afraid she was trembling and could not keep her voice as hard as she wished. She held the girl’s buckskin dress against her chest. “But she is dead.”

Mary and Jube would not look at Gonkon. Millie and Gonkon

had been sent away with another band of Kiowa, as soon as there was word that a search had begun for the little girl. Then Gonkon had come back alone and said that Sain-to-odii had died of a fever. But Gonkon had not slashed her arms or cut her hair or grieved aloud.

“He says he has another wife. He doesn’t want you.” Mary regarded Gonkon with a blank face.

th e n i f o u r
price is too high, what will you do?

“I will go on to Santa Fe. I can make a lot of money carry- ing things from Santa Fe but I will never make any money chasing around after my wife, all over this country.”

Then what do you offer?

Britt turned and pulled the pack around beside himself. He set out the gold coins, the figured cloth, and the jewelry.

“I want my wife and my two children and for that I have ten dol- lars in gold and some other things. Necklaces and bracelets and silk and those two horses. The spotted ones.”