Enemy Women (44 page)

His horse wavered on into the hundreds of square miles of wetland, into the nation of mosquitoes and rare, damp flowers. The boles of the immense trees standing away like the arches of a cathedral. Neumann was sweaty and dirty, his horse’s hooves sucked holes in the mud and water. He leaned forward on the split pommel of the saddle. He took out his penknife and cut the end from the cigar. He lit it with a phosphorus match, dropped the smoking match into the water. He puffed on the cigar and waved it to keep the mosquitoes away. He made himself use his injured hand in spite of the pain.

He went on for another mile or so. Enough to smoke half the cigar. Neumann rode the bay up to the bole of a water oak and pressed the glowing ash from the end of the cigar, to save it. Then he rode on for a while, leaning forward over the horse’s shoulders to try and see what it was they were stepping into.

He put the cigar butt in his jacket pocket.

All morning he threaded his way through the swamplands, guessing where the high ground lay beneath several inches of water. They splashed on through and listened to the sounds of bitterns laughing, something unseen hurrying away. Neumann lifted his hat from his head and ran his clawed fingers through his hair. His left hand throbbed.

Then he pulled up the bay horse to listen.

For the last half hour he had heard a distant steady splashing, drawing closer and closer.

Neumann took out the half cigar and lit up the cigar stub again, squirting out fumes, tipping his head back.

He turned, and through the trees he saw Captain Tom Poth come riding. Neumann reached behind himself and worried the umbrella loose from its ties. He laid it across his lap.

Poth came up to Neumann, weaving through the dark water on a jittery, nervous sorrel horse. He was smiling. There was a long roll of rope tied to a saddle ring behind the cantle and he was carrying in one hand, loose in his lap, a government issue revolver. Hanging from his belt was a pair of manacles. They jingled. His face wavered through the shadows of the vast trees, grinning.

I’m empowered to look in them saddlebags, he said.

Don’t they pay you people? said Neumann. That you have to make your living by robbing? The damp air closed around Neumann’s chest like a vise and he wondered if he should shoot Poth’s horse now. Do something now. He was so close to finding Adair and was so weary of dead men.

He said, I’m tired of the war, Captain Poth. Let’s see if we can come to some kind of an agreement here.

Tom Poth had taken off his coat in the heat, and had tied it in a bundle behind the saddle. He was wearing a nonregulation checkered shirt of green and blue linen homespun. His hands were hairy with red hairs and his nails were black. His face was freckled and running with sweat. The sorrel he was riding jittered and stamped, afraid of the swamp and the standing water. He started to lift the revolver.

Neumann didn’t want to shoot. They would hear it back at the ferry landing.

There’s nothing in my saddlebags you want, Neumann said. But now, we could trade horses.

Trade horses?

Yes, look here. There’s money in this for both of us. Poth frowned and stared at him with small eyes. Neumann leaned down and grasped Poth’s looped reins. Poth reached down to stop him but all he got was
a slash across the back of his hand and a line of blood sprang up and began to run. Neumann whipped his penknife through the reins, and then jammed the smoking cigar up the sorrel’s nostril.

Poth was lifting the revolver and Neumann opened the umbrella. The great fan of the umbrella, blossoming up out of nowhere, and the cigar up his nose, turned the sorrel to a lunatic. He reared up so high he nearly went over backward and Tom Poth’s shot roared upward into the trees.

The sorrel gelding then squatted down on its haunches and sprang forward in a leap that was a perfect arch, and when he hit the water he was running. He was throwing his head from one side to another and so could not see where he was going.

The horse’s cut reins were flying and sheets of water flew up from its hooves like fans, ropy with duckweed and stems. Tom Poth clung to the saddle pommel with both hands.
You son of a whore!!
he screamed.

Neumann sat and watched as the horse bolted onto what seemed to be higher ground and crashed against a water oak, slamming Poth bodily against the bole of the tree so hard his head flew back. Somewhere in all the turmoil Poth got off another shot but it too went wild and the thick puff of smoke lifted slowly. The horse charged on with Poth reeling and slopping side to side in the saddle, and then they disappeared.

Neumann sat and listened to the fainter and fainter sounds of hooves splashing, it sounded like a fulling mill. Then he couldn’t hear anything but tree frogs.

Neumann quieted himself. He bent down to look at his revolver in the pommel holster and took a series of long breaths. After a while he rode on.

He followed the trail torn through the wetlands, for the sorrel horse seemed to know his way; he was going somewhere. Maybe he had been stolen from the people of the Ozarks and was heading home, back to the mountains and the high country. The horse had found one of the ridges, one of those snaking, meandering dykes of land a foot or so
higher than the surrounding swamp, and was following it, and so Neumann and the bay horse followed it too. The wavering path he had slashed through was even now closing up again. The dark, four-inch-deep water was quieting now into stillness, the trefoil surface plant sliding back in, the wetland saw grasses springing upright. In the distance Neumann heard the clattering noise of a flight of ducks taking to the air. It told him that Poth was still on ahead.

The ripped trail of his horse was marked with things: Poth’s hat, the pieces of leather reins, torn brush.

Overhead in the canopy of vines rare swampland birds sang and fought and announced the presence of human beings. The splash of the bay horse’s hooves sprayed mud and water, and made it hard to hear anything, but occasionally he stopped to listen. There was the cry of a bittern, and then a slow whap-whap-whap as off in the trees a blue heron rose on its pipestem legs and beat its way upward with immense wings. After half an hour Neumann began to hear something like a tuneless singing up ahead.

As he drew nearer, Neumann knew it was a moaning sound.
Ohhhhhh,
the voice said.
Ohhhh God. Help me.
He heard the snorts of a frightened horse.

He stopped his horse again to listen, looking with a deep predator’s intent through the trees, his hand closing on the revolver’s grip.

Ohhh stop. Whoa fellow. Oh stop. Stop.

He splashed on and then ahead between the tree boles he saw a long deep light. A reflection. In the strange geography of the swamps there was a sort of lake, and the cypresses had sent up their conical root structures into the air, two feet tall, cypress knees. In among them was the sorrel horse with the U.S. saddle and bridle. He was leaning and pulling, for his stirrup seemed to be hung up. Sunlight fell from overhead in brilliant drapes of light, illuminating the shining sorrel hide in spots, and then a boot, and a leg in Federal blue hung up in the irons, stretched out long.

Tom Poth lay with his head caught firmly between two cypress
knees, his face barely above water, calling out to Neumann. The horse had thrown him at some point, and his foot had gone through the stirrup iron, and the sorrel had dragged him pell mell through the runneling dark waters and weeds, and then Poth’s head had caught up between two cypress knees as if the wetlands itself had taken him in hand.

Neumann came up and got off his horse, dropped into the ankle-deep water and felt roots crush beneath his boots. He walked through the sloshing water. Looked down at Tom Poth.

The Militia captain’s head was firmly jammed between two large knees. His ears were nearly torn loose and blood was staining the water around his head. He gripped a tall cypress knee with one hand and the other, probably broken, dangled uselessly in the water. The pistol had twisted over onto his belly in its long-nosed holster and it was half under water, and so the powder would be useless. The horse was stomping as if he would stave holes in the water. He fought to be loose of this confusion.

Help me!
Poth screamed.

Look at this, said Neumann. He stood there with his hands touching a cypress knee, amazed at the entanglement the man had got himself into. I’ll be damned.

Help me, said Poth. He looked up helplessly, his eyes dark with mud.

In hell, said Neumann. I would help you on your way to hell.

Neumann sloshed over to the straining horse.

Don’t scare him, said Poth. His voice was suddenly calm. I’m about killed. He’s tearin’ my head off.

Neumann turned and smiled down at the man. I could whip the horse, he said. It would likely pull your head off.

Before God, gasped Poth, from down in the mud. I am about to die.

Neumann patted the horse on the chest, between the front legs, and then on the neck, and the sorrel quieted a little. He slogged around to the far side, looking at Poth over the seat of the saddle. He took the Federal blue coat from the saddle strings.

Then he looked in the saddlebags and there he found an account
book. He opened the pages with muddied, damp hands. It was in a dark red leather. Inside was written, Marquis L. Colley, Justice of the Peace, Jackson Township, Ripley County, Missouri. There were dark stains of old blood on it.

Look at this. What have you got here?

That’s from some rich fellow, said Poth. He’s got his money in a Cape Girardeau bank and I aim to confiscate it. I can do that kind of thing. Martial law. I’ll give you it, I’ll give you all of it, look there, he had thousands of dollars. I think there’s more than two thousand dollars.

Where is Marquis Colley? Neumann’s hat was pulled tight over his forehead. Where is Judge Marquis Colley? He turned cold eyes on Poth, it was as if the blood within him had turned cold and so he became slow and deliberate in his speech.

Cut me loose, said Poth.

Neumann stared at Poth for a long moment. Where is he?

I let the boys have him, said Poth. I never did nothing to him. The boys wanted him, before God, I never did a thing to him. I swear, he could be free somewhere.

His leg was stretched out in the stirrup iron and it seemed the iron was cutting through his boot, his foot was badly twisted, maybe the ankle was broken. Neumann stepped a muddy boot on Poth’s throat.

I will drown you, he said. Where is he?

The boys! he screamed. The boys took him, it wasn’t me! They was mad about something before the war! The boys shot him!

The leeches were already nestling into his neck, like gray kisses.

No they didn’t. A raccoon chittered in a long purring stutter from a tree and wavy lines in the pool marked where cottonmouths spun off into their holes.

All right, I shot him, I shot him. Now look, look, that two thousand dollars is easy got, said Poth. He lifted both hands to the cypress knees and fought to get his head out of the crotch. I can show you where they lived.

Where is he?

You get me loose, Major, I’ll take you there.

Neumann looked down at Poth and knew that Poth would never take him to Marquis Colley’s grave. Nor could he force him to. As soon as they got out of the swamps they would be back in the hands of the Militia and under martial law.

Neumann took his revolver out of the holster on his saddle, and then searched through Poth’s saddlebags where he found a box of ammunition. He worried it out between his bad hand and his good one.

Oh yes, you can have that ammunition, said Poth, and the horse too, the horse too. Just cut me loose.

Shut up. The watery and hollow silence of the wetlands closed around them. Neumann felt the strange glacial surge in himself that he did before a battle. He sat and watched as Poth sank lower and lower into the water. Listened to him beg. The horse started forward again and again.

Finally Neumann heard Poth’s neck snap. He looked down into Poth’s eyes. His hands had fallen each to one side in the tea-colored water.

No use now, said Neumann. You’re paralyzed. Your neck’s broken.

I could still live, said Poth in a small voice. I could still get along.

Neumann watched as the face sank below the water and its eyes began to bulge like eggs with white all around them, and he waited until all was still, and then he turned the sorrel loose. He got on his horse and rode away.

AFTER A WHILE
he came to a plank road raised a few inches above the water. It sank and wavered under the weight of the bay horse. It sloshed as he drummed along. The sycamores and cottonwoods now turned bright green, scattering leaves like largess, like green shillings. The willow oaks spilled off tumbles of grapevines weighed down by emerald unripe grapes. There were flocks of red-beaked Cumberland
paroquets that made noises like doors being broken open by burglars. In their thousands they launched into the upper canopy and they all cried out together with a noise like nails being torn out of wood.

He rode on mile after mile into the dim golden sunset light. The low land was juicy with water. His horse sounded like a drum orchestra on the plank road. Neumann knew he would not hear horses if they were to come up riding behind them at a distance. And so long into the night he went on.

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