Comanche Sundown: A Novel

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368 32 A s Garrett’s buggy came into the outskirts of Mineral Wells, they were overtaken by a jackass party in a merry hurry. Concessionaires had taken to renting donkeys to health faddists for scenic outings up in the hills. The women in this bunch jiggled on sidesaddles; their hats were laden with paper flowers and waxed fruit. The suited men whacked their burros into a trot with riding crops. Garrett steered the chestnut to the right, stood up, greeted the ladies with a forefinger to his brim, and tried to offer any of the gentlemen a business card. With a derby on his head and a cigar clenched between his teeth, the last one laughed at Garrett. He stared after them blackly and sat back down. The resort of Mineral Wells now rivaled Galveston. In an old mustang canyon, a homesteader swore that his well water healed his rheumatism, and a few dippers a day restored the wits of a crazy woman, his wife. She lost her mind one day when renegade Comanches were still a peril, and a hard crossing of the Brazos killed one of their oxen from exhaustion, still in the traces. It just went to its knees on the bank. Then a lightning bolt struck and killed the other ox. The homesteader was deaf for several days. He hired some men from Weatherford to help him build a double-log cabin on their claim, and then he got a water well dug, and the blather of his wife cleared right up. Well, there was money and market in that story. Hotels and conventions, bathtubs and clarinets. Fixed with porticoes for sidewalk shade, the buildings were built of sandstone or brick. Sign-painters had covered up the sides with offerings of bottled-water cures for sore throats and inflamed eyeballs. “Takes 369 the temper out of Red Heads,” promised one brand. “Puts ginger into ginks and pepper into plodders.” Garrett pulled into a livery and left the horse and buggy with a boy. They walked past the long open drinking pavilion next to the Crazy Well. Under chandeliers and tooled bronze ceiling, fops and ladies fanned themselves and held glasses of water like they were goblets of champagne. Crazy water. To Bose it tasted like the same old gypsum brine that cramped bowels all over the plains. Local hawkers of the stuff proposed that these particular ground salts contained a trace of the fad lithium, endorsed by New York doctors as a cure for all manias. Maybe Bad Hand Mackenzie gulped too much out of his canteens. Mackenzie had gotten his precious general’s star fighting on against the Sioux and northern Cheyennes after Custer’s miscalculation on the Little Big Horn. Mackenzie twice invaded Mexico, scattering the Kickapoo in the Sierra Madres, and bluffed the last hostile Utes out west into surrender. Sometime in the eighties he’d come back to San Antonio to command the army in Texas—which made Bose nervous—and the Indian fighter was in all the social pages with a sweetheart and fiancée. Then shocking word spread even to cotton farms in Parker County that Mackenzie had been relieved of his command, suffering “paralysis of the insane.” Syphilis was the most common slander. He died in an asylum on Staten Island, New York, the year before the turn of the century. Hardly anyone but old Indians attended his funeral. Bose admired and enjoyed his acquaintance with the man but couldn’t rightly say he mourned him. He’d spent fifteen years in dread of Bad Hand testifying against him. “You’re awful quiet,” said Garrett. “Are your nerves steady? I’d hate to have to shackle you.” “Take your hand off my arm.” They climbed a hillside that boosters called Welcome Mountain . On its summit was the Chatauqua Theater. Garrett walked up on the columned porch and opened doors of beveled glass. Bose 370 removed his hat and followed him up stairs carpeted in blue. On the second floor there was a door elaborately painted 5¢. Garrett turned the brass doorknob and found it locked. He knocked several times politely. Then he kicked it with his boot. A bald white man with pink suspenders and jittery countenance opened the door. “You’re Garrett?” “I am.” The man looked at Bose and turned pale. “My god, man. You can’t bring him in here.” Thing is, Bose...