Lamb of God O Perfect Prince. Please in the meantime forgive this hapless sinner, Lord. Amen.
Across the deck, on Walton’s command, Ambrose was teaching the troops to read. There’d been grousing about having a Negro tutor the men, but Walton had delivered a stirring lecture about the necessity of the races getting along. It was why, he confessed, he’d chosen a Negro as his number two man. When no one seemed moved by their leader’s oratory brilliance, however, he had threatened to dock the pay of any bigot. Meanwhile, Walton spotted the tip of a bow among the troops.
Red Man! he called, replacing his hat, securing the cinchcord underneath his chin.
A tall red-skinned man stepped up out of the crowd of students; the bow belonged to him.
You’re Cherokee or something, aren’t you? Walton said.
Something.
Don’t get “riled.” Why isn’t your hair longer? In a braid? There’s not really a C.D. rule about hair length. In fact, it might be fashionable if you were to let it grow—
Long hair is vanity.
Ah. Yes. We agree. I’ve been needing to “get my ears lowered” too. But listen. What’s your opinion of, if we’re tracking a certain convicted sodomite, and we’re on a steamboat, say, forging upriver, and our quarry is probably, you know, on land by now, going really fast, train or horseback, whatever, and we’re stuck here on this unholy lurching boat moving about a knot a day which is essentially not moving?
I’m not sure I understand, Mister Walton.
What I mean, he went on, is that I’m adroit at explaining things. Especially with a blackboard. But let’s try it this way, Red Man. Is it okay for us to get off this unholy raft and get the horses some exercise before they go crazy, and get the men some exercise before
I see. The tall Indian leaned his bow aside and adjusted his quiver of arrows. He frowned and pursed his lips and squinted his eyes and gritted his gleaming teeth, as if for him thought manifested itself as a severe headache.
Walton’s thoughts ran back to Evavangeline. To that day in Shreveport when she worked the door in the tavern across from the cheap hotel where he was living. (When they “bunked” in town on rare occasions, the other deputies usually shared a room, Ambrose out back in a barn or shed as most of these establishments harbored ill feelings for Negroes. But Walton always preserved his privacy for devotionals and prayer. It wasn’t classist, he insisted to his mother in his long, florid letters, but was instead the necessary separation of leader from led.) On the day in question, he was ambling out of the barber’s from having a shave and boot shine and saw her standing in the door under the saloon’s awning. One in the afternoon. She was dressed like a schoolgirl. Pigtails. Her cheeks smattered with fake freckles. She fetchingly held a sign that said “Fuck $1” and was illustrated by a crude drawing of a man and woman copulating “doggie-style”; Walton assumed the latter was for Shreveport’s copious illiterate. The leader of the Christian Deputies stood in the middle of the street watching the girl. Then she noticed him. He couldn’t look away. A clatter of horse and buggy blocked them and then they saw one another again, his clothes flecked with mud and horseshit, a lump in his pants. She fingered the lapel of her shirt and flashed him a quick-tiny breast, startling and white in the sun and then gone, but not before he’d seen the bloodred nipple as big as a thirty-eight caliber cartridge.
Mother! Lord Jesus!
He’d covered his eyes with both hands and whirled, weeping. She went back inside.
The next day he’d spent in his room. He prayed and slammed his fingers in the drawer of the desk on which he ought to have been writing dialogue for the play he’d been outlining in his logbook. He would try that. He dipped his quill in the inkwell and swirled it around. He brought it up dripping and blotted it. It was hard to write with his fingers throbbing. He made a mental note to slam his other hand next time. Painfully, he began to make a letter. Capital “B.” He followed it with a lowercase “r” and was well on his way to spelling “Breast” when he slammed down the pen. His fingernails were turning black, and he had a sudden restored memory of being dressed like a girl, his nails painted red. He covered his face with his hands and his eyes gazed out through the bars of his fingers.
O Lord Jesus Christ comfort me in my prison of pain!
He shut his eyes and prayed that he would be miraculously transported to another location, as when God had miraculously transported Lot and his family from the doomed sodomites in the cities of the plain. But opening his eyes he could still see the harlot out the window across the street wiggling her hips like an effigy of sin itself. Right there. In the doorway. Dressed as a squaw this time. A drunk sidled up to her and stared openly. He appraised a hand along her hip. She turned around at his behest and raised her leather skirt. O her bottom! Walton jerked his head hither and yon, discombobulating the things on his desk, but the man’s own wide buttocks blocked the view of hers.
The Christian Deputy leader fell back onto his bed, sobbing and pinching himself.
In a flash he was at the window again.
Beneath the awning the drunk man was whispering in the girl’s ear, braced on her shoulder to stay afoot. She nodded and they went inside. Walton watched, his breath fogging the glass, his heart an overheated toad frying in the cauldron of his ribs. Upstairs, across the street, the harlot appeared in a window to pull down the shades. Before she did, though, he saw her lick out her tongue at him.
Serpent!
He tried to fill a cup with urine so he might drink it, but his turgid member refused to cooperate, the down- bending so pleasurable in itself that it nearly betrayed him.
He had rushed downstairs right then, pants abulge, ascot atangle, and burst into the deputies’ room, where the men were supposed to be engaged in an exercise about the sucking out of snake venom. There were several empty liquor bottles scattered about the floor that, without being asked, Loon testified had been left there by the room’s previous tenants. He hiccupped.
Men, Walton cried. Sin! He pointed upstairs.
Thus rallied (Ambrose rounded up from witnessing to a group of degenerates playing “craps” in the alley), the entire troop lurched across the street in full uniform, several adjusting the things in their pockets, their leader seen by some to be pinching his male member through his tight pants. They entered the saloon, Red Man lowering his bow, an arrow notched, to fit inside. They bounded up the stairs, behind Walton. Red-faced, he had kicked down the door and burst in the room and away she’d flown out the window like a shade flapping up.
Meanwhile, on the boat, Red Man had recovered from his bout of thinking. No sir, he said. Regarding your question of abandoning ship for hot, dusty horse travel overland.
Why?
Because to track a man is to know him. To track a man is to honor him.
Pardon?
Knowing and honoring a man are aspects of tracking him. In my tribe before the Wars and dark years of reservation life, before I fled east to escape the Apache and Comanche and the Pawnee and the Rangers and revenuers and cavalry men and bounty hunters, I, like you, also was a teacher. Of young braves. Sometimes the other warriors called me coward for choosing to be with the little ones instead of out earning feathers and ribbons and pieces of clothing taken from massacred white men and women and children and kept and passed father to son in a family for as many generations as the piece of clothing lasted—sometimes just a scrap, the cuff from a shirt, or only a button—
What in the world are you talking about? Walton asked.
To track a man is to know him. To know him is to honor him. And to truly honor him (which is part of tracking him) you have to go exactly where he went, suffer his very path, riding when he rode, walking when he walked, as close as you can get, stepping when possible in his very footsteps. You finger every broken branch, touch each smudge of dirt with your eager tongue, you work at becoming him—
Wrong, said Walton. Why would I want to become a sodomite? Captain! he called.
A dour, scruffy man shuffled forward. Aye?
Steer us over to the bank, sir, hard aft. The leader clapped his hands. “Pronto!”