Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

Genres: War & Military

Synopsis

Acclaimed author Robert Olmstead's Far Bright Star "packs a potent emotional wallop" (Booklist). In 1916, aging cavalryman Napoleon Childs leads an expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. But Childs' troops are wiped out, and he is left to die alone in the Mexican desert.

Release date: May 26, 2009

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 218

Sample

1

Thus far the summer of 1916 had been a siege of wrathy wind and heated air. Dust and light. Sand and light. Wind and light.

There was drought and the land was parched and dry and the country bleached, burned out, and furnacelike. At first, dogs attended the troopers, but then they experienced a plague of fleas, so the order went out to shoot the dogs.

It was 125 miles south of the international line in Colonia Dublán where the expedition had established its headquarters. They were well supplied. They shipped in tons of material by rail, truck, and mule team and employed thousands of civilian workers. The cantinas and whorehouses were open all night long and the only hardship, other than being there, was riding out each day to patrol the dry dusty roads. They were in search of Pancho Villa and his bandits who on March 9 audaciously attacked Columbus, New Mexico, burning, looting, killing, and they’d been hunting him ever since.

But everywhere they went it was the same story. They just missed them a day ago, an hour ago, the next high valley, the next mountain peak, a cave that did not exist. By most measures the expedition had been a failure.

His brother’s job was to turn out as many horses as possible in service to the U.S. Army, while his was to turn out as many horsemen as possible. He took his men out every day and led them over country of all kinds, to teach them every plateau, arroyo, bajada, canyon. He had little faith in their ability and even less in their capacity for improvement.

He remembered Bandy’s lips so cracked and blistered it was near impossible for the boy to eat and when he spoke his mouth was too swollen to form words enough to make sense. Every one of them had a case of the piles from so many hard days in the saddle. The seat of Turner’s pants was spotted black where they’d bled into the cotton material and would not wash out.

Each morning the red dawn came and all day long was the blazing and deadening heat, but the night could be freezing cold with a swing in temperature of thirty degrees between high noon and midnight.

They wore their peaked Stetsons low on their foreheads and still the light so bright they spent their days squint eyed, or staring through the color-tinted lenses of their goggles. There were wire-framed glasses to purchase: deep green, rose colored, and blue. But there was no blazing corona in the sky to see and only light as if there was no head or brain or mind, but only the idea of light.

He remembered these as the conditions of their lives when they departed expedition headquarters that white chalky morning to hunt the wild beeves. He remembered the morning itself and its dim blue light and upon waking the decision he made to begin another day.

This is what he remembered of those days in Mexico and much later in life some of it he would talk about, but not everything. He was not inclined to talking, but about these days in the desert, he was even less so.

He remembered a small man, a minor jefe politico, wearing a black felt hat. He was peddling a red hen and a white hen, held by the legs in each hand, and inside the perimeter, down the wind, there were penned and mudded barrow hogs, their flies and their drift of stink.

He remembered a horse trader talking to his brother. Their father had named his brother Xenophon after the ancient horseman and his own name was Napoleon after the great general. Xenophon liked to feed the horses peppermints and the smell of peppermints was constantly on his hands and breath. While he talked to the horse trader, the horses slopped their lips in the trough, their tails idly whisking flies.

From a narrow dirt street there emerged a wedding party, women in summer dresses and men in shirtsleeves, returning home from a long night’s celebration. A little wind was moving but not much. Then it concentrated, took a man’s straw hat from his head, and disappeared. A water cart trundled by, sprinkling down the dust that would dry and rise again.

He remembered the butchers hooking a team of horses to the hide of a steer they’d slaughtered, slowly dragging the hide off the steer inside out, pearly with tallow and white as snow. The small man wearing the black felt hat, peddling the red hen and the white hen, his jaw working as he watched as the horses tore away the hide.

There was Arbutus, a liquor-head, and from time to time he’d throw himself onto all fours and bark like a rabid dog and he’d howl from the end of his outstretched neck. It was after the dogs were shot Arbutus could be seen dragging a leash with an empty collar and after that he started going down on all fours.

There was the sleeveless baker in his stiff white apron gritted with flour. The baker smoked a cigar he never ashed but let the ash gray and curl and when cold it fell of its own accord. He thought the baker disagreeable and to possess violent proclivities.

There was a goat he remembered and a butcher wearing a bleached-white apron carrying a sticking knife pointed at the sky. The blade gleamed and he caught its light in the corner of his eye. A gaggle of boys followed behind waiting for their chance to lug off the head and guts. Among them was the boy who shined his boots and carried a tin whistle he blew and there was the legless boy strapped to a wheeled platform propelling himself forward with his fists.

And he remembered the chaplain that morning, his joyful greetings and feral sense for all human weakness except his own. He was Protestant, but in Mexico he’d assumed the black cassock, cincture, and a dangling gold crucifix. The people thought him mad for how clamorous his expressions of faith. He descended on the wedding party and snatched a baby from a frightened mother and was lavishing its head with kisses. The mother bowed in fear and held out her hands in supplication, hoping to recover her baby before its soul was eaten. Napoleon did not like the chaplain and suspected him of simony and the selling of indulgences.

And he remembered Preston, a robust young man, his arms and shoulders and neck roped with muscles. Preston wore a very beautiful deerskin jacket that morning, elaborately beaded with long fringe at the sleeves and shoulders. He preferred riding a gray horse with long and rangy legs and that morning was no different. He was urging the photographer to hurry in setting up his camera. He insisted upon a photograph of himself, Stableforth, and Turner on horseback. Preston organized socials and the three wore military cloaks and silver cuff links and all belonged to the same men’s club in Delaware. They wore white linen shirts that smelled of eau de cologne and favored flowery bow ties carelessly tied in exploding knots.

The photographer stood at his tripod holding his hat over the lens. The photographer had a habit of setting fires with his flash powder and had managed to burn up a small portion of Mexico.

Why Napoleon consented to such an outlandish request, he had no idea, because for Preston, for what he’d done, he felt only contempt.

A flash went up, an explosion of powder and coming toward him through the rags of smoke was Preston riding the gray.

“What do you want?” Napoleon said before Preston could address him.

“I just want to talk.”

“I don’t know what I have to say that’d be of any interest.”

The others watched their exchange, looking for some sign that might ease the unrest rippling through the camp.

“I apologize for the trouble,” Preston said.

“You don’t know what trouble is.”

“I’d give anything I have to make it not that way.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t sorry me,” Napoleon said, dismissing the man.

The gray turned and back-stepped and Preston rejoined the men. Napoleon thought to light the cigarette he’d been carrying behind his ear. He put it between his lips. He looked to the sky, a wind-gall. Black disklets floated in his eyes. He closed his eyes and opened them. Today would be weather.

2

The horse Napoleon rode that morning was a night-colored stallion called the Rattler horse. It had legs like iron posts. It was known as a hard-mouthed bastard, sharp and difficult rather than easy and lazy, and was blind in one eye so refused to turn on the forehand in that direction, but it didn’t matter because it always knew where to go. The horse was able to take a ditch without a spill, clear a wall, leap down a bank at the gallop, or spring up one. It was the very demonstration of impulsion and forward mobility, but was a mean and unforgiving horse.

The first time he mounted the horse it reached back and took his foot in its mouth and dragged him out of the saddle. It was a bitey horse and tried to take a chunk of him. The next time the horse went to bite him he jammed a sizzling beefsteak into its mouth. The horse screamed and lunged from the burn, but it never tried to bite him again.

But on the whole, the Rattler horse was a most absolute and excellent horse. By many accounts the best horse in the army. The horse could start and stop quickly, reverse itself, back up, change directions, stand still when he fired the Springfield and charge at a controlled canter. The Rattler horse was deep chested with a short back, strong haunches, flat legs, a small head and small feet. The horse never lamed, crippled, or galled. The Rattler horse, leaned down to bone, was tireless and unflagging, and his collection of the horse always certain.

On the other hand, his brother rode a succession of mounts. He liked horses with broad short loins because the more easily they collect the hindquarters and lift on the forehand. He believed conformation was behavior and yet, however conformed, they would eventually displease him and go out of favor.

Riding out with him that morning were Extra Billy, Bandy, Preston, Stableforth, and Turner. Extra Billy was named because they already had a Billy when he arrived so he was an extra Billy. He wore a razor scar from ear to chin, a wound he took in the Philippines, back in the day when drunk he cheated at cards. Extra Billy’s nose was already bleeding from the dry and heated air.

Extra Billy and Bandy were regular cavalry. Preston, Stableforth, and Turner were all three irregular, America’s eager export of losers, deadbeats, cutthroats, dilettantes, and murderers come to Mexico to be part of the hunt for the bandit Pancho Villa. They were the rich and bored gallants. They’d already showed signs of sadism, filing down bullets and hollowing out their points. Now they were half asleep and hung over and as useless to him as tits on a boar hog, with little promise they’d ever be more.

It was last night when word came to him the men were tearing it up and he set out to find them before someone was killed. It wasn’t long before he found them in a cantina. Turner and Stableforth were at a table awash with the light of an oil lamp. They wore wing collars and black silk neckties. They were sitting with two other troopers, Drunk Pete and the German. They were smoking cigars and each had his own bottle of whisky and they had long since dispensed with the use of glasses. They told him they were having a whale of a good time. When he asked after Preston they told him he was in the back with a woman. Drunk Pete was saying how much he loved the army, the rations and liquor being first rate, when there came a summoning scream of pain and horror from the curtains hung at the back. For what reason he did not know, Preston had cut off the woman’s ear.

Fools like them were arriving every day: freebooters, felons, Christians, drifters, patriots. They claimed to be marksmen and veterans of battles no one ever heard of. They were surgeons, mechanics, assassins. Some invented names like Cash McCall, Tennessee Slim, the Kid, Tex, Reverend Joe. In turn, names were invented for them. They were called Fathead, Stupid, Numbnuts. Most were just a bunch of losers and jerk-offs, more trouble than they were worth. They were the future dead, Napoleon thought.

The old soldiers and the young soldiers—both died. They died accidental and intentional. They died from disease and crushing falls. They died from ass-to-hand dysentery. They died from their own horses.

But for Napoleon and his brother, life and death were the same and meant nothing. They’d served from the Indian wars through the Philippines, living in the closed world of the soldier, mistrusting outsiders and only certain of their own, and even then you were obligated to constantly demonstrate your trustworthiness or you were no longer trusted and then you were shunned and driven out. For instance, Arbutus was crazy, but they still trusted him.

As they prepared to ride out that morning there was the distant stuttering of a machine gun gone silent on the firing range as another belt was loaded through the feedlock. The marching band was gathering beneath a shade tarpaulin. Fires blazed in burn pits and the smoke wove above the ground with the stench of the latrines.

He caught sight of his brother again, feeding the horses peppermints. His brother preferred life with the horses, the Negroes, the Apaches. He was a tamer of horses and stayed with the horses and was rarely anywhere but with the horses. His brother loved horses, pleasured in rubbing them down, currying and brushing, and was a sight to behold when witnessed from the ground. He rode with his feet forward and his back and shoulders in perfect arch. Other men stopped to watch him make his pass. He was like a god flying above the earth.

Napoleon loved horses too and the way he and Xenophon sorted through the government horses made them worth their weight in gold. When they first crossed the international line, their horses were fat and indulged, but now their horses were so lean and fit you could see the rippling muscles of their diaphragms. He and his brother, they had no deep feeling for land or people, only horses.

“Hey, Bandy,” a trooper named Wheeler yelled. “Kiss my ass.”

“You are welcome to go to hell,” Bandy yelled back, his words clotted and garbled. Bandy tipped his hat and there followed an exchange of shouted abuse. Wheeler was a loudmouth and no good and Napoleon had told Bandy to stay clear of him.

Bandy was fair skinned with a rash of freckles across his nose and cheeks. His hair was red as a rooster and in all ways he was vulnerable to the sun. He burned and blistered and suffered heat illness. He tried to keep his lips coated with Vaseline, but was always eating. It seemed the boy ate everything he could get his hands on and made him wonder if as a child he’d been starved.

“You covered up good?” Napoleon said. He himself wore a wide neckerchief and slung around his neck were sand goggles. His belt was full of ammunition in five-round clips and he carried extra in a bandoleer over his shoulder and another across his saddle, a Springfield rifle fitted with a scope in a saddle boot.

“I am sweating like a pig,” Bandy said.

“When you stop sweating is when you’re fucked.”

“Yessir,” the boy replied. He wore a wide-brimmed Stetson and a large square neckerchief, his face only in shadow. He wore long sleeves and stout gloves with a long loose wrist. He claimed to be eighteen years old, but the truth was more like fifteen.

“It’s surely gonna be hot today,” Bandy said, puffing the words from his mouth.

“Don’t talk about it,” he said.

“It’s gonna be hot enough to put hell out of business.”

“What’d I say?”

Bandy. . .