“Cathay, you not going to pee?” Vikers yelled back over his shoulder at me the next day. He was lined up with most of the other troopers. They had their backs turned and were pissing onto the hard-baked dirt.
It was three in the afternoon. We’d been riding for ten hours since we broke camp at five and hadn’t come across so much as a pile of rocks high enough to squat behind. The prairie rolled on in all directions, endless as an ocean. An ocean set hard on drowning me. The only things throwing shadows across that dry flat land were a long column of horses and men and one girl had to pee so bad she was sweating yellow. No milch cow, hours past milking time, had ever been as full as I was.
Though I’d made sure that neither my unharnessed bumps nor the least stain on my light blue trousers would betray me, Vikers seemed to notice that something was different. He was paying me even more attention than usual, remarking on how I didn’t piss with the others and the like. The way he sniffed around made him seem about half wolf, like he’d picked up the scent of blood and tracked it back to me.
A horse nickered and Greene, peeing with the others, jerked to look behind, sending his stream flying over the boots of the soldier next to him who cursed and promised to slit Greene’s throat if that ever happened again.
Vikers, mounted now, came up next to me, and asked again, “You’re not going to relieve yourself?” His piercing voice had dried out so much it now sounded like a rusty nail being pulled from a cedar post.
I tucked my chin into my neck and came back salty, “What? You keepin’ count?”
Vikers’s ugly, bow-faced mare nudged in close to Bunny. “Nothing to count. Last two times we stopped, you stayed in the saddle.”
“So, you are keepin’ count.”
“Oh, I’m counting, Cathay. You best believe I am counting.”
“You ain’t right, Vikers.”
He wheeled his mount around so he faced me head-on, plucked his spectacles out, and wrapped the gold curl of one arm then the other around his ears like he was fixing to read one of the papers that decided our fates. And now, in the withering glare of a sun that shone twice as bright as it did back home, he was reading me, and pronounced, “Someone round here isn’t right, but it isn’t me. Is it?”
I pulled up tall and stared kerosene waiting for the flame back at him. I’d give the pipsqueak something to read. I’d give him a grandma sharpened her teeth to points so she could rip out the throats of her enemies.
His voice softened until he sounded almost kind and he went on, “I said it before, I’ll say it again, something’s not right about you, Cathay. Not your fault,” he said, sounding like a friend concerned about my welfare, wanting to help me. “You know it. I know it. Every trooper here knows it. It’s bound to come out. Bound to.”
For one second, I thought about how easy it’d be to confess, clear the air, just be myself the way I always had. I snapped out of that, though, and said, “Step off, Vikers. You crowding me. Man.”
He smirked and rode away. I gripped the stock of my carbine, and looked off into the distance, praying for a few scraggly trees, even some piles of rocks. Nothing stopped my gaze, though, until it hit a line of blue mountains could of been a thousand miles away. It took me a bit to notice a few pale squiggles of motion. I figured they were just heat waves rising from the sandy earth, but the squiggles took shape and I saw them to be the pale wolves the Mexicans called lobos. They trotted along in the shimmery heat for a long time, watching us with their yellow eyes. Then, in the blink of an eye, that cruel emptiness swallowed them up whole.