BLOOD ON THE SAND

         

excerpt from The Long Hunt

        Jon Bumby was bleeding from his belly, but he didn’t let it slow him down. The Indians called him Three Crows, or Marked Nose, for the scar they had given him, but that was a long time ago. The name he used now was Jon Bumby, and Jon Bumby was leading a horse across the desert with drops of blood trailing after him in the sand. Some of the blood came from his belly, and some of the blood came from the woman draped across his saddle.

            It didn’t matter whose blood it was, the Wolf would follow it’s trail.

            For a time, Jon Bumby had lived with the Comanche. The old woman had taken him in and often he had slept in her teepee. The band he traveled with was small and accepted him. They taught him the ways of the Comanche. How to live in the harsh land of the Rio Escondido and Llano Estacado, and places in between this world and the next. He learned how to cut a man open and show his insides to him while he lingered at death’s threshold for hours or days. He learned how to set a white-hot coal on a man’s belly and watch it melt clear through to the ground.

            Jon Bumby stayed with the Comanche long enough to learn these things, and then he moved on. The Comanche had learned he was bad medicine and they were glad to see him leave. There were no goodbyes when he left the old woman’s lodge. Only her rheumatic eyes watching him as he rode away. She said she would see him again, but she did not seem pleased with this knowledge.

            He went back to the village under the cover of darkness and took one of the Comanche children. A warrior’s child. The warrior was named Rising Sun, and he was a chief amongst the Comanche. Jon Bumby took the child to a place sacred to the Comanche. A place where the old people prayed to the spirits, and where the young ones sought visions. He took the child there into the mountains and bashed the child’s brains out with a rock. He left the child’s lifeless, ruined body on a cliff overlooking the sunrise, for all of Creation to see. For all the Comanche to see. For Rising Sun to see.

            That place was bad medicine to the Comanche now, and they called it the Black Mountain. No longer did warriors and mystics travel there on pilgrimage. No longer did the Comanche seek vision amongst its heights. Now, it was a place cursed with the blood of their young. A place of ghosts and spirits. A place to be avoided.

            Jon Bumby led his horse over the hard, rocky crevasses. The woman he had stolen lay draped over his saddle like a dead body. She wasn’t dead yet, no matter how much she might wish it. Her wrists and feet were bound tightly with leather thongs stretched beneath the horse’s belly. They cut deep into her pale skin, leaving bracelets of blood around her wrists and ankles. Rags torn from her dress covered her feet, the fabric dark with her blood. The woman had fixed the bandages herself. Jon Bumby had not cared. He didn’t care at all for the woman, but he knew she was part of the game.

            She made herself part of the game and she would see it through to the end. He would make sure of that, because the Wolf was following her scent now.

            Jon Bumby, or Three Crows, as he thought of himself, had felt the Wolf’s presence for years. Now, the Wolf was close. Closer than he had ever been. He could have waited for him, back in that hole of a town the whites called Sandy Bottoms. Or back in Adobe Flats, where the game between them had first begun. Or a hundred other places where the Wolf had followed him over the last five years.

            But then the game would end, and he wasn’t ready for it to end. Not yet.

            The old woman told him the Wolf was coming. He had already known this, but the old woman had given the wolf its name. She told him many things. Some of them he did not wish to hear. The old woman wasn’t afraid of him. She smiled at him, showing teeth the color of coffee beans. He called her mother, and she called him son, though they shared no blood. She couldn’t stay with the Comanche anymore. Not after what he had done.

            He told her he had come to reap the rotting fruit of the world. To pluck it from the contaminated vine before it fell to the earth and spread its disease. He said he wanted to sink his teeth into its flesh and feel warm blood gush down his chin, like eating a fresh buffalo liver.

            She had only smiled at him. The old woman. The old witch woman.

            Behind him, the woman groaned. He knew her name was Grace, from the talk in the town. She had propositioned him. Her face was full of disgust and she refused to look him in the eyes, and yet she had had the nerve to offer her body to him for a price. The bald man had sent her over, and he had wanted to kill them both right then, to show them what true horror could be. The ugliness of the scar along his nose was nothing compared to the true horror of the world.

            Now, he would have his chance. And he would savor it.

            The woman behind him stirred, but he didn’t bother looking back, or slowing his walk. The pain in his belly was constant and it drove him further on. Two days ago, he had pounded his fists into her face and beaten her head against a rock, and she had not moved since. With his knife, he had made fine slices across her body that would not bleed enough to kill her, but would serve as a constant, painful reminder of his power and control. When he placed her limp body over his saddle, he had ripped away the back of her dress, so that the sun would burn down on her pale, white skin. Now, that pale flesh had turned as red as the canyon walls his trail took them through.

            The woman had shot him with a pistol she had hidden. He had come to her in red light of early evening and kicked her awake with the toe of his moccasin. He heard a metal click and looked down to see her holding a little pistol in her hand. She pulled the trigger and he felt the burn of powder against his skin. He felt the bullet tear through his belly. He reached down and took the pistol away from her and beat her with it until it broke into pieces. He took his knife and almost cut her throat the way he would if he were slaughtering a pig but stopped himself. He gripped her jaw in his bloody hand and held her swollen face to his.

He said, “No whore’s bullet will kill Three Crows. Only the Wolf can kill me. I have seen this in my dreams and the old witch has seen it in hers and no whore is going to change that.”

He placed the blade of his knife against her face and said, “Open your eyes.”

Grace couldn’t force her eyes open. The fear of the man with his hot breath inches from her face froze her with fear.

“Open your eyes,” he said again. He spat into her face and put just enough pressure on the blade to bring a small trickle of blood gliding down her cheek. “Open your eyes,” he said, as tears washed clean trails down her dust and blood cover face, “or I will cut them out.”

Grace pried her eyes open. The man’s face was large in front of hers. He smiled grotesquely, the scar that ran along the side of his nose swollen and discolored.

“You think you have killed me. You think your bullet will drag me down.”

He pulled the knife slowly against her cheek and warm blood flowed down her neck. He placed the knife on the other side of Grace’s face and sliced her flesh. Grace cried out but stifled her anguish as Bumby’s grip tightened against her jaw.

“The Wolf thinks he will kill me. He thinks this because I killed his woman and his bastard. But he is wrong. The old woman is wrong. No one can kill me.”

He placed the blade against Grace’s forehead and drew another red line. Blood flowed into her eyes, blinding her.

“When I die,” he said, “you will die. The Wolf will die. That is the only way. Only then will I let the spirits take me. Until then, all you will know is pain.”

He cut her again, slicing lines into her face to make her as ugly as he was. Then he beat her until he tired of it and she lay almost lifeless at his feet.

Light pierced through Grace’s cracked and swollen eyelids. She had thought she was dead until the waves of pain washed over her body, reminding her how she still clung to this horrible world.

No, she wasn’t dead. She was hanging upside down, strapped across her captor’s horse. She tried to move and felt nothing but pain. Pain from the cuts and bruises covering her body. Pain from her exposed back, burned beyond comprehension. Pain from the wounds in the souls of her feet and from the bindings at her wrists and ankles. All Grace knew was pain.

She felt the horse stop and heard his footsteps approach. Soft crunches against the desert gravel filled her with dread. Her eyes welled with tears and her heart thudded beneath her smashed, bruised bosom. She had had her chance to end this and she had failed. Her only wish now was that she had used the pistol on herself.

She felt a tugging at her bindings beneath the horse’s belly and the world slid past her. She tumbled to the ground like a tattered ragdoll. She wanted to scream as her scorched back raked against jagged stones, but all she could manage was a moan.

Jon Bumby took a canteen from his saddle. He pulled the cork and poured water into his cupped hand. He held it out for the horse to drink, and then patted his wet hand against the wound in his belly. The wound oozed with gelled blood and the skin was black around the edges of the hole the bullet had left.

Grace looked up and found the man’s dark, deep set eyes staring down at her. In those orbs, she saw only misery and ambivalence.

He reached into her tangle of blond hair and pulled her head back.

“Drink,” he said.

He held the canteen over her mouth and allowed a quick drip of water to reach her parched, pealing lips, then let her hair go with a thrust and she fell back to the ground.

He stood and looked away to the horizon from where they had come. He was always watching their backtrail, as if someone was following them. But Grace knew no one was coming. Not for her. No one cared about a whore from a dead-end town. A place few had ever even heard of, and those that had were not the sort of men who rescued people. She was all alone out here with this man, this creature, like a castaway forced to choose between drowning and being eaten by sharks.

But Grace knew she didn’t have a choice. If she did, she would have drowned days ago.

“You will not die,” the man said, as if reading her thoughts. “Not until I allow it.”

Grace was beyond tears, even if her swollen, beaten face allowed more than beads of moisture to pool on the corners of her ruined eyes, she knew she couldn’t cry anymore. There was nothing left in her. She felt the slow moan building up inside her body and she heard the sound it made. But it couldn’t be her voice. That shrieking wail couldn’t be coming from inside her.

It couldn’t be.