“Does this little tick want to cling to his enemy’s back all day?” asked the warrior.
Jeremiah watched Zeke glance his way for approval. He nodded. Only then did Zeke slide from Coal Bear’s back.
The gray-eyed war chief smiled. “Now, will someone tell me what is going on here?”
“We were playing only,” the youth said.
“From where I stood,” the gray-eyed one replied, gesturing back to a shady spot among the buffalo-hide lodges raised among the leafy cotton woods along the creek bank, “the two of you were making sport of our young friend here.”
Jeremiah swiped more troublesome sweat from his eyes, where it stung and muddied the dirt thrown at his face by his two opponents.
“If he is to be one of us, uncle,” said Snake Brother, using a term of respect for the warrior, “then he must learn. It has been said by the elders’ council.”
The handsome war chief scratched his chin. “So let us see if he can hold himself against only one of you.”
That instantly wounded Jeremiah’s pride. “I can take them both!” he shouted back in that tongue still unfamiliar. Yet he struggled to learn the language. Just as he would learn to fight like these Indian boys.
The warrior smiled knowingly. “It is good that you do not shy away from what trouble comes calling on you.”
“We will never turn our faces away from trouble,” hissed little Zeke in his near-perfect Comanche.
Jeremiah glanced at his younger brother, sensing a swell of sentiment for Zeke. He was all Jeremiah had now, with his father gone off to war many winters before. And the band of looters who came to lay waste his father’s farm but ended up instead carrying off those his father had left behind. Early on Jeremiah had determined that if he could not escape his circumstances with those bloodthirsty thugs, fleeing back to southwestern Missouri and home … if nothing else, he would then forge a family of the two of them. Little Zeke and Jeremiah Hook.
That little family was all either of them had had for so long.
Riding bareback tandem on a stolen horse into the Creek Nation over in Indian Territory with the band of white freebooters who had kidnapped them from the family home, Jeremiah rarely saw his sister or mother in those first few weeks. Then months had crept by.
It was only time, a lot of it. So much time that Jeremiah could not be sure how many months had slipped past. Perhaps even years. He was certain only that there had been several long summers broken by the cold of winter. And once more they were in the days the Comanche called the Moon of Drying Leaves.
Summer had come, and was retreating, burning the land quickly. Jeremiah had been but eight years old that last birthday before he was taken. He had counted three more summers since. He could celebrate no birthdays. There was no one to remind him of such a special event as one day flowed into the next, one week slipped into the next moon, each season cycled into the next winter until he began to sense just how much time had passed beneath his moccasins.
“You there,” declared the tall warrior as he stepped over to the wary Jeremiah. “Seems you and your brother are such good fighters that we should put your white names away for all time now and give you the names of famous warriors of The People.”
“Yes!” Jeremiah’s head bobbed. Zeke’s eyes grew as big as milk saucers.
“In four days, then,” the warrior said, patting a hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. His other hand patted Zeke’s too. “We will have our naming ceremony for you both.” The warrior turned to the pair of older boys. “Coal Bear, teach them well for four days—the bow and knife. How to ride on the side of your pony.”
The two bigger youths nodded, their dark eyes flicking quickly to the two white boys grown so dark-skinned, their long and wavy hair bleached by the light from the summer’s sun.
“As you ask, uncle,” replied the taller youth.
“I already ride well,” Jeremiah said, catching up the warrior’s hand.
He stopped. “You ride well for a white boy. But you have much to learn. Now you must learn to ride like a Comanche.”
As he watched the young warrior stride away through the tall grass, Jeremiah swore he would learn to ride, just like a Comanche warrior. To mount and dismount from either side, to ride bareback, to ride even without a bridle—becoming one with a particular animal. This was a dream come true to a young boy of eleven summers. To become one of The People. To become a Kwahadi Comanche.
For so long Jeremiah had wanted only to be dead.
He and Zeke had been hauled up behind two of the looters come to their Missouri valley. Their mother and sister were thrown on other horses, behind other riders. After his warning barks, old Seth already lay dying in the yard, a bullet hole in his head, tongue lolling out like a swollen piece of pink meat dropped in the rich black dirt.
That night the unspeakable horror had begun as some of the laughing, hard-handed men had taken their turns holding the two boys down, while others assaulted Jeremiah and Zeke, sodomizing their two young prisoners as the men cursed what they called “godless Missouri Gentiles.”
That was but the first night of many more to come, each day a living hell, making it painful to ride the bony spine of the horses as the boys were plopped behind the saddles of the looters during the day, assaulted by the smelly men each night. At first Jeremiah grew frightened when he began to bleed. Then he became ashamed when he passed more and more blood, oozing and sticky, drying in his britches like the tears he and little Zeke cried almost constantly, calling for help as the men clamped their wrists and ankles, dragged their dirt-crusted fingers through the boys’ hair, and held their young faces against the stinking crotches. Laughing.
Always the laughter rang in Jeremiah’s ears. The more he fought the men who held him down while others assaulted him, and the more he screamed, the more their wild laughter seemed to echo through the nightly camps where the two boys were beaten with the short rawhide whips the men used on their horses. It seemed so long ago now, like nothing more than another short lifetime, as Jeremiah remembered the shame of his tormented wounds weeping and oozing with a foul stench, his back aflame as flies laid their eggs where he could not reach to scratch.
Jeremiah rarely saw his mother those first days out of Missouri, at least not the woman he thought was her. She had been limp, carried from horseback to a tent at night, then back to her horse, where she was tied every morning for the day’s travel. Later he saw the woman herded out of an ambulance the freebooters had stolen, looking as if she were half-asleep.
It was the same with Hattie. He had wondered if those men were doing cruel, unspeakable things to her privates as well.
But long as those days and weeks had seemed, the boys’ imprisonment with the white looters was over before the following summer. They were bartered off to some brown-skinned men when a camp of Mexican traders rendezvoused with the white renegades. When a high enough price was settled upon for the two boys, Jeremiah and Zeke were sold into slavery.
“You’re going to Chihuahua!” roared one of the white looters as he dragged Jeremiah over to the Mexican carts. “Their kind is gonna like having a young, tender gringo like you to play with way down there!”
“Where?”
“Mexico!”
“M-mexico?” Jeremiah had gasped.
“Them greasers allays pays good money for slaves bound for the Mexican trade down there, boy!”
While the Mexicans did once beat the two boys when Jeremiah and Ezekiel failed to do as they were told in that foreign tongue, at least the comancheros did not sodomize their terrified treasure as the procession of carts and horsemen began their trip south by west across the land haunted by the Comanche. The sores on Jeremiah’s back and buttocks began to heal. The long, oozing welts started to shrink, becoming long, ugly red scars that laddered up the boy’s body from shoulder to thigh. Those were hypnotic days spent beneath the hot sun in those carts rumbling across the shimmering heat of the frying-pan plains, bound for a place where Jeremiah somehow sensed no decent white man had ever set foot.
Then one chill night on that trackless prairie, a handful of the comancheros had argued over little Zeke. Jeremiah understood what it was they wanted, so he offered himself to them, hoping they would leave his little brother be. But they took Zeke, anyway. Took both of them.
