Read Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) for Free Online Page B

Chisum’s cowboys, accustomed to water from the same mineral-laden redbed that taints the Brazos far to the west, used to carry shakers of salt when they trailed into strange country, that their drink might taste the same as usual.…
    Sizzling rain began, unheralded by any gust of air. I dragged the boxes and sacks into a hasty pile and put the tarp over them, and tumbled into the tent. The pup was having one of his shivering, gasping seizures. Heavy, the rain drowned the fire’s small flicker, and since the lantern inits box was with the flashlight under the tarp outside, I shed my boots and pants in the dark, trying not to rub the canvas with my shoulders, and slid into the bag.
    Young, one
was
Jesse Veale, or Charles Goodnight, or sometimes an Indian, a brave one.… One saw them heroic in size and posture, and transmuted them into myth, and tried in reverie and play to live the myth; it is the process that in this day has shaped the whole Western legend into a raucous lie flooding out from bluely glowing television screens.
    There was heroism, but there were people, too. Older, having seen a few heroics at first hand and having probed one’s own possibilities, one knows more about Joe Corbin, feels what he likely felt, leans down with him along his running horse’s hot neck and glances back with him past his biceps at a clot of screaming, hating, hacking savages, knows the panic, and the pointlessness of turning the pony back and dying there, too.…
    Young, one moves in upon the country and thinks himself a tile in its tesselated ecology, and believes that he always would have been such a tile, and hoots with the owl, and scorns even tents.
    Older, one knows himself an excrescence upon the landscape and no kinsman to any wild thing; one hears the bass drumbeat and the gabble of the rapids below and the roar of the rain and feels abrupt depression and wonders why he barged out alone into the wetness and the winter. And thinks that perhaps, in the old time, he would have been one of the cautious who stayed in the jammed East.
    I lay awake for a long time with a kind of three-o’clock-in-the-morning apprehension on me. The pup shiveredagainst my side. The river boomed and burbled against its rocks. At last, half-awake, or I thought so, I heard the booms and burbles change into drums and voices, and it was Comanches and Kiowas somewhere off across the creek. Multitudes of them, in angry fiesta, and there was in me a wonder whether or not they’d find me …
    For a time I had a consciousness too that the sound was not really voices and drums but the Brazos. With full sleep, though, that consciousness went away, and the delusion went into a dream in which the celebrants were angrier and louder and knew I was there and were searching in a loud line, while I scrabbled away on hands and knees in the wet scrub.…
    “Kah
-seh!”
one screeched from nearby, and another answered in syllables as clear.
    In life, I have only known that feeling in war, at night, on bitter little islands in the Pacific. That tangled into the dream until the hating Comanches were not distinguishable from hating Japanese in the underbrush beneath palms.…
    When the dream had ended its feel still rasped my sleep, so that later when a cramped shoulder woke me and I rolled over, the rain still roaring, the rapids still booming, I felt relief and chuckled. I was on a whimsical trip down a river, and the trip didn’t amount to much. The little tent was warm. The flavor of wartime was still on my mind, but now what I remembered was the tents of an encampment we had far up on the side of Haleakala, on Maui, where in the days the yellow sunshine splashed off the red slopes around us and the Pacific far below and the crags of the volcano above, and where at night it used to rain so hard that there was nothing in the world but roaring rain and a tent and oneself, young and tight-bellied, on a dry warm cot.… The evening’s foreboding was gone, and I