But now the man was stirring, arching onto his head and getting his knees under him.
Valdez rose and stood there, trying to turn his head to look about him. He moved forward slowly, shuffling in the leaves. He turned sideways to edge between trees that grew close together. Farther on he stopped and placed one end of the crosspole against a birch trunk and waved the other end of the pole toward a tree several feet from him but the pole was too short. R. L. Davis watched him move on, touching a trunk and trying to reach another with the crosspole until finally there it was, and R. L. Davis saw what he was trying to do.
Valdez stood between two trees that were a little less than six feet apart. Now, with the ends of the crosspole planted against the trunks, holding him there, he tried to move forward, straining, digging in with his boots and slipping in the leaves. He bent his wrists so that his hands hung down and were out of the way. Now he moved back several steps and ran between the two trees. The ends of the crosspole struck the trunks and stopped him dead. He strained against the pole, stepping back and slamming the pole ends against the trunks again and again. Finally he moved back eight or ten feet and again ran at the space between the trees and this time as the ends struck, R. L. Davis heard a gasp of breath in the silence.
He moved the sorrel out of the foliage. Valdez must hear him, but the man didn’t move; he hung there on the crosspole leaning against the trunks, his arms seeming lower than they were before.
R. L. Davis saw why as he got closer. Sure enough, the pole had splintered. And it looked like a sharp end had pierced his back. R. L. Davis sat in his saddle looking down at the blood spreading over Valdez’s back. He reined the sorrel around the near birch tree and came up in front of him.
“I swear,” R. L. Davis said, “you are sure one dumb son of a bitch, aren’t you? When that pole broke, where did you suppose it was going to go?” He saw Valdez try to raise his head. “It’s your old amigo you tried to swing a scatter gun at the other day. You remember that? You went and shot the wrong coon and you was going to come at me for it.”
Davis sidestepped the sorrel closer to Valdez, pulling his coiled reata loose from the saddle thong and playing out several feet of it. He reached over, looping the vertical pole above Valdez’s head and snugged the knot tight. “You’re lucky a white man come along,” Davis said.
Valdez tried to raise his eyes to him. “Look at my back,” he said.
“I saw it. You cut yourself.”
“God, I think so,” Valdez said. “Cut my wrists loose first, all right?”
“Well, not right yet,” Davis said. He moved away, letting out rope, and when he was ten feet away dallied the line to his saddle horn. “Come on,” he said.
Valdez had to move to the side to free an end of the crosspole and was almost jerked from his feet, stumbling to get between the trees and keep up with the short length of rope. He was pulled this way, through the birch trees and through the brush that grew along the edge of the grove, and out into the glare of the meadow again.
“You must ache some from stooping over,” R. L. Davis said.
“Cut my hands and I’ll tell you about it.”
“You know I didn’t like you trying to hit me with that scatter gun.”
“I won’t do it anymore,” Valdez said. “How’s that?”
“It made me sore, I’ll tell you.”
“Cut me loose and tell me, all right?”
R. L. Davis moved in close in front and lifted the loop from the upright pole. He kept the sorrel close against Valdez as he coiled the rope and thonged it to his saddle again.
“Your animal doesn’t smell so good,” Valdez said.
“Well, I’ll give you some air,” R. L. Davis said. “How’ll that be?” He moved the sorrel tight against Valdez, kicking the horse’s left flank to sidestep it and keep it moving.
Valdez said, “You crazy, you put me over. Hey!” He could feel the bottom of the upright pole pushing into the ground, wedged tight, and his body lifting against R. L. Davis’ leg. The sorrel jumped forward, sidestepping, swinging its rump hard against Valdez, and he went over, seeing Davis above him and seeing the sky and tensing and holding the scream inside him and gasping as his spine slammed the ground and the splintered pole gouged into his back.
After a moment he opened his eyes. His hat was off. It was good, the tight band gone from his forehead. But he had to close his eyes again because of the glare and the pain in his body, the sharp thing sticking into his back that made him strain to arch his shoulders. A shadow fell over him and he opened his eyes to see R. L. Davis far above him on the sorrel, the funneled hat brim and narrow face staring down at him.
“A man ought to wear his hat in the sun,” R. L. Davis said.
Valdez closed his eyes and in a moment the sun’s glare pressed down on his eyelids again. He heard the horse break into a gallop that soon faded to nothing.
4
St. Francis of Assisi was the kindest man who ever lived. Maybe not kinder than Our Lord; that was different. But kinder than any real living man. Sure. St. Francis had been a soldier once and got wounded and after that he wouldn’t step on bugs or kill animals. Hell, he talked to the animals; like the time he talked to the wolf – probably a big gray lobo – who was scaring everybody and he told the wolf to stop it. Stop it or I’ll skin you, you son of a bitch, and wear you for a coat. You would talk to a wolf different than you would talk to other animals. But he talked to all of them, birds, everything; they were all his friends he said. He even talked to the stars and the sun and the moon. He called the sun Brother Sun.
But not today you couldn’t call it Brother Sun, Bob Valdez thought.
It was strange the things he thought about, lying in the meadow on a pole like a man crucified, remembering his older sister reading to him a long time ago about St. Francis of Assisi and his prayer, or whatever it was, The Canticle of the Sun. Yes, because he had pictured the sun moving, spinning and doing things, the sun smiling, as his sister read it to him. Today the sun filled the sky and had no edges. It wasn’t smiling; this day the sun was everything over him, white hot pressing down on him and dancing orange, red, and black dots on his closed eyelids.
He remembered a man who had no eyelids, who had been staked out in the sun and his eyelids cut off. And his ears cut off also and his right hand. He remembered finding the man’s hand and finding the man’s son in the burned-out farmhouse on the Gila River south of San Carlos, after Geronimo had jumped the reservation and raided down into old Mexico. They didn’t find the man’s wife. No, he didn’t remember a woman there. Maybe she had been away visiting relatives. Or they had taken her. No, they had been moving fast and she wouldn’t have been able to keep up with them. It was funny, he wondered what the woman looked like.
She could look like the Lipan Apache woman and have a child inside her. She could look like the woman with Tanner standing on the loading platform – he remembered her blond hair and her eyes watching him, a blond-haired woman in that village of guns and horses and freight wagons. Her face was brown and she looked good with the sun on her hair, but she should be inside in a room with furniture and gold statue lamps on the tables.
He remembered the girl Polly at Inez’s place and her robe coming open as she leaned over to look at the green book and then the black one. He should have stayed. It would be good to be there. It didn’t matter about the girl – later – but to be in a bed with the shades down, lying on one side and then the other and moving his arms, bending them all he wanted while he slept. He would only wake up at night when the sun was down and Brother Moon or Sister Moon or whatever the hell St. Francis called it was in the sky with its soft light, and he would drink cool water from the pitcher next to the bed. When the girl came in he would turn his head and see her face, her eyes in the darkness, close to him. She had dark hair, but he thought of her with light hair, and this didn’t make sense to him.