“I told you it was over,” the Sergeant said once we were out of sight of Matanza. After that, we tramped on without him opening his mouth again except to spit out the bile rising from his liver.
The trail rose then fell in a long, gradual slope toward the fort. It dropped away on the south side down into the valley that Agua Dulce Creek ran along. I was watching a hawk dive through the sun-bleached sky when the Sergeant startled me by saying, “To hell with this.” He stopped dead in the middle of the trail and, seeming to notice me for the first time, asked, “Why should we kill ourselves getting back to the fort?”
“So we won’t get hunted down and shot for deserting?”
He spit, then reached back under his waistband, brought forth a small, flat brown bottle, uncorked it, tipped it my way and said, “Here’s to you, Private. You’re a man-humping degenerate and more trouble than you’re worth, but the way you called out that egg-sucking pisspot of a mayor? That took more guts than you can hang on a fence.”
He gulped down a long tug, then passed the bottle to me. “Come on, Cathay,” he said, “we’re going AWOL.” He left the trail and disappeared down the hill we’d been climbing.
I was like a cat watching two pieces of yarn get pulled apart. I didn’t know what to be more stupefied by: the Sergeant revealing himself to be a spitting, cussing, drinking man or one who seemed to be deserting. The dust settled around me and I was as alone as Adam before he lost a rib. I thought for a moment, maybe two, about a firing squad all aiming at my deserter chest and then I followed him off the trail.
Though I galloped down the steep incline, following the twisting path that the Sergeant was scraping in the sandy dirt, I couldn’t catch sight of him. His trail wound through high boulders that abruptly gave way to a stand of desert willows and cottonwoods just tall enough to throw some shade. The willows were heavy with pink and lilac blossoms that looked like orchids and smelled like sweet talcum powder. The creek running through them was clear and, I discovered, cool.
The desert willows, greedy for that rare moisture, grew thick along its banks, blocking my view and swamping me with the womanly powder smell of their blossoms. I pushed through a dense fringe of long, skinny leaves and found the Sergeant standing naked in a water hole that reached up to his waist. Cottonwoods shaded the large pool and their heart-shaped leaves floated atop it amidst the squiggly patterns traced by water striders.
He held the brown bottle up high like he was saluting me with it and called out, “Thought I’d lost you. Come on in.” Even more astonishing, he was grinning.
I didn’t move.
“Don’t worry,” he said, running the palm of his hand across the still pool, scattering leaves and water striders. “I already scared off the cottonmouths.” He tipped his head up and drank. I watched the long column of his neck work and did not move.
“Can’t you swim?” he asked, taking my stupefaction for fear. “It’s not deep. Look.” Holding the bottle up high, he dunked his head under, and came back up, flinging crystal droplets from his hair. The water came up to his waist when he stood. Water sluiced down over his shoulders, chest, and belly.
“Suit yourself,” he said. Taking another long pull from the bottle, he lowered himself into the water and leaned against the boulder at his back. Arms to either side, eyes closed, he was the picture of a man taking his ease.
I ducked behind a thick stand of willows, stripped off everything except my shirt and drawers, double-checked to make sure the bindings were on tight, and waded in. The water was cold and I shrieked. Catching myself, I turned the girlish cry into a grunt and stifled the impulse to fold my arms across my chest.
“Nice, huh?” he asked.
I turned shy and dove underwater.
It was like going home, all the way back to the times when I’d hide out in the creek that ran through the woods around Old Mister’s farm with a reed in my mouth and the world above my head turning into smeary blues and greens. The water around me now was all the greens of the willows and cottonwoods and the velvety moss growing on the round rocks. A small cloud of perch swam through my fingers. The Sergeant’s legs wobbled, sliced into gleaming walnut sections by wavy shafts of sunlight. I quickly looked away from the dark patch where they joined.
The water made my drawers and undershirt so soppy that they sagged and clung. Afraid that too much would show if I stood up all the way, I only popped my head and shoulders out of the water.
The Sergeant took no notice of me as the peaceful pond had sent him into a dreamy mood. He said nothing, just handed the bottle my way.
I squat-walked over to him and took it.
“Nice, huh?” Allbright asked again after a few more passes of the bottle.
“Yessir.”
“Come on, now, Cathay, don’t ‘sir’ me out here.” Even his voice was different. It had a low gentleness to it that hummed through my belly.
“Yess—” I stopped myself before the “sir” jumped in there.
The Sergeant stared off at a buzzard making long, slow pirouettes through the cloudless sky. He watched it for a long time before he shook his head and chuckled like he’d just told himself a joke that wasn’t particularly funny, and said, “Army can make a white man salute the uniform, but it can’t make him give a man the respect that goes with it.”
“They’re civilians, sir. And fools. Forget about those corn-cracking, piss-drinking skunks. Not a one of them’s fit to tote guts to a bear.”
This got the first real laugh of the day. “For a degenerate sissy, you’re a good man, Cathay.”
“Thank you.”
He leaned against the boulder, his long arms stretched out, head lolling back. Drops of water sparkled in the tight whorls of his dark brown hair and in the coiled spring of his lashes. He studied the depthless sky. In the shaded sunlight, his eyes showed flashes of amber. I swallowed.
Girl, quit eye-eating the man.
I looked away, but not before he caught me staring at him like the lovesick sodomite he took me to be. He snorted a weak laugh, amused and unbothered by what he seemed to have accepted as my peculiarity, and went back to his lounging and drinking.
Eyes closed, he said, “It’s too late for us, Cathay. Doesn’t matter where we go in this country, they’ll be waiting for us. The corn-cracking, piss-drinking skunks. You know what our only hope is?”
“What’s that, Sergeant?”
“Our children. It’s like Brother Douglass says, it’s easier to raise strong children than it is to fix broken men. And that’s what we are, Cathay. We’re broken men. We have to create a new generation built from the ground up of strong, capable men, true and brave.”
“And women,” I added, quietly.
He chewed on that for a moment or two then sat up abruptly and slapped the water with his free hand. “Damn it to hell, Cathay, you’re right. It takes someone like yourself who doesn’t have the normal man feelings about women to see that they’re the key.”
“Well, men can’t do it alone,” I pointed out. “This creating a new generation.”
The gleam came to his eye that meant he had been seized by an idea. “The problem is finding a woman whose spirit hasn’t already been broken. Who hasn’t been warped beyond repair. Made into something that she’s not. Like you and Lem. In your own way, not that I approve, but you two haven’t let anything change who you really are, have you? Not slavery. Not a civil war. Not even the U.S. Army.”
I thought of all the ways I was not who I really was and said nothing.
Too fired up to notice my silence, the Sergeant went on. “You and Lem. He’s your all in all and you don’t give a hang what the rest of the world thinks.”
Lem and me?
“You have that steel inside you to know who you are. That’s the kind of wife I need. One with that unbendable steel. I’ve only ever met one woman made of such strong stuff.”
I didn’t know if my heart could stand hearing him speak again of the dream woman I never was and never could be.
Nothing moved except for a light breeze shimmying through the dainty leaves of the mesquite tree. The buzzing whine of the cicadas filled the silence before he finally asked, “Have you ever had a memory so perfect you were afraid that putting it into words would spoil it?”
I nodded. I did. Yes, I did.
“Cathay, remember when I spoke before of the woman who saved my life? Whom I loved though I’d never even seen her?”
“I do,” I answered, the jealousy I felt for the woman I both was and could never be twisting like a knife through my guts.
“I don’t know what it is about you, but, in spite of, or maybe because of, your ‘peculiarities,’ you are the only one I’ve ever breathed a word about her to.”
I nodded. Too sad to comment, I watched a water strider carve a V into the still water that grew wider and wider until the ripples reached almost to either edge of the water hole.
“Cathay, I need to apologize to you.”
I bit back the “Sir?” that sprang to my lips and said nothing as he went on. “I was wrong. For condemning you. Who am I to condemn anyone for who they love when my heart belongs to a woman whose name I don’t even know?”
He flicked up a geyser of water with his thumb like he was shooting a marble, the drops pattered down around us, and I muttered, “It’s fine.”
“It’s not though. Not when I think of how besotted I am. How often I’ve tried and failed to chase her from my mind. My heart. Yet still I cling to the conviction that I will find her and will know her when I do. And here’s the oddest part of my odd story. I will know her because she bears six rows of scars, marks of Mother Africa, raised upon her skin like the most perfect of pearls.”
I came close then to yanking down the neck of my wet shirt, showing him those very scars, and … and what? The sight would destroy the only bond I truly had with Wager Swayne: the memory of our days and nights together. And all I would have then would be Wager’s embarrassment and disappointment at seeing the marks which belonged on the womanly beauty of his dreams on a body that was neither womanly nor beautiful.
The drone of the cicadas became a mean buzz in my head so loud and painful it took me a second to hear that the Sergeant was asking in a pleading way, “Damnation, Cathay, why do they always think we want their women? Why is that? The last thing on God’s green earth I want is a finicky, stringy-necked, prissy, dried-up white woman. What I want is…” Longing even deeper than what burdened me silenced him.
He sucked in several breaths before he stated a truth wrenched from his deepest soul. “I want a black woman.”
The words stacked up one atop the other like he was erecting a statue. Once it was up, the rest came tumbling out. “You know how it is, Cathay? Well, maybe you don’t.”
It didn’t matter if I answered or not. Or even if I was there or not, his voice ragged with desperation, he was saying what he had to say.
“No other woman smells like a black woman. Feels like a black woman. Feels like…” He stopped again, bound not to break down in front of one of his soldiers, one of his men. He took another drink then stood up and walked out until no part of him was covered. Water streamed down his naked backside.
At the edge of the pond, he stopped and, determined to say what he had to say, no matter what the cost, he turned and faced me. Standing tall and lean and strong, he was as I had imagined he would be. He was as God had imagined a man should be. His broad shoulders caught then turned loose of the sun as they heaved up and down a fraction before he composed himself and concluded, “No other woman feels like home.” He nodded and repeated to himself, “Like home.” I could barely hear when he concluded, “A black woman. I want to hold. A. Black. Woman.”
I’d never heard such loneliness in my life. Angry at all that had been taken from him, all he’d never had, he bent over, snatched up his uniform, and walked away.
I dove beneath the water, and sunk like a stone to the bottom where I sat and hugged myself, my right hand pressed against the rows of scars as my body remembered who I was.
I ran my hands over my breasts. Being a man, eating mens’ rations, living in a man’s guarded body, had made me a woman. My breasts had filled out into pretty, budded things. There was a flare to my hips now that hadn’t been present before.
“Private! Cathay! Where are you?”
Underwater, the Sergeant’s voice sounded distant and wobbly, like he was calling to me from a long time ago. From back in the free time when I would have run wherever my feet and heart carried me and I would have loved and protected a king.
I pulled off the undershirt and the drawers. Then I unwound the long strips of muslin from around my breasts. They twirled, floating and dancing about me like white smoke rising from damp wood.
I was naked. I rose to the surface.