Hombre

“They do the same thing to them they do to Indian women,” Braden said, and after that no one spoke for a minute. All the sounds, the rattling and the wind hissing by, were outside. Inside it was quiet.

I kept thinking that somebody ought to say something to change the subject. In the first place I felt uneasy with the talk about Apaches and John Russell sitting there. Second, I thought Braden certainly shouldn’t have said what he did with ladies present, even if Mrs. Favor had started it. I thought Dr. Favor would say something to her again, but he didn’t. He could have been seven hundred miles away, his hand holding the side curtain open a little and staring out at the darkness.

I would like to have said that I thought Mr. Braden should be reminded that there were ladies present, but instead I said, “I don’t know if the ladies enjoy this kind of talk very much.” That was a mistake.

Braden said, “What kind of talk?”

“I mean about Apache Indians and all.”

“That’s not what you meant,” Braden said.

“Mr. Braden.” The McLaren girl, her hands folded in her lap, was looking directly at him. “Why don’t you just be quiet for a while?”

Braden was surprised, as all of us were, I suppose. He said, “You speak right up, don’t you?”

“I don’t see any other way,” she said.

“I was talking to that boy next to you.”

“But it concerned me,” the McLaren girl said. “So if you’d be so kind as to shut up, I’d appreciate it.”

That was something for her to say. The only trouble was, it egged Braden on. “A nice girl talking like that,” he said, watching her. “Maybe you lived with them too long. Maybe that’s it. You live with them a while and you forget how a white person talks.”

I couldn’t see Russell’s face or his reaction to all this. But a minute later I could see what was going to happen, and I began thinking every which way of how to change the subject.

“A white woman,” Mrs. Favor said, “couldn’t live the way they do. The Apache woman rubbing skins and grinding corn, their hair greasy and full of vermin. The men no better. All of them standing around or squatting, picking at themselves and the dogs sniffing them. They even eat the dogs sometimes.”

She was watching the McLaren girl again, leading up to something, but I wasn’t sure what. “I wonder,” she said, “if a woman could fall into their ways and after a while it wouldn’t bother her. Like eating with your fingers. Or do you suppose you could eat a dog and not think anything of it?”

Here’s where you could see it coming.

John Russell said, “What if you didn’t have anything else to eat?” This was the first time he’d spoken since we left Sweetmary. His voice was calm, but still there was an edge to it.

Mrs. Favor looked from the McLaren girl to Russell.

“I don’t care how hungry I got. I know I wouldn’t eat one of those camp dogs.”

“I think,” John Russell said, “you have to know the hunger they feel before you can be sure.”

“The government supplies them with meat,” Mrs. Favor said. “Every week or so I’d see them come in for their beef ration. And they’re allowed to hunt. They can hunt whenever their rations are low.”

“But they are always low,” Russell said. “Or used up, and there’s not game enough to take care of everybody.”

“You hear all kinds of stories of how the Indian is oppressed by the white man,” Dr. Favor said. I was surprised that he had been listening and seemed interested now.

He said, “I suppose you will always hear those stories as long as there is sympathy for the Indian’s plight, and that’s a good thing. But you have to live on a reservation for a time, like San Carlos, to see that caring for Indians is not a simple matter of giving them food and clothing.”

He was watching John Russell all the while and seemed to be picking his words carefully. “You see all the problems then that the Interior Department is faced with,” he said. “The natural resentment on the part of the Indians, their distrust, their reluctance to cultivate the soil.”

“Having to live where they don’t want to live,” John Russell said.

“That too,” Dr. Favor agreed. “Which can’t be helped for the time being.” His eyes were still on Russell. “Do you happen to know someone at San Carlos?”

“Many of them,” Russell said.

“You’ve visited the agency?”

“I lived there. For three years.”

“I didn’t think I recognized you,” Dr. Favor said. “Did you work for one of the suppliers?”

“On the police,” Russell said.

Dr. Favor didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see his expression in the dimness, only that he was still looking at Russell.

Then his wife said, “But the police are all Apaches.”

She stopped there, and all you heard was the rattling and creaking and wind rushing past and the muffled pounding of the horses.

I thought, Now he’ll explain it. Whether he thinks they’ll believe him or not, at least he’ll say something.

But John Russell didn’t say a word. Not one single word. Maybe he’s thinking how to explain it, I thought. There was no way of knowing that. But he must have been thinking something and I would have given anything to know what it was. How he could just sit there in that silence was the hardest thing I have ever tried to figure out.

Finally Mrs. Favor said, “Well, I guess you never know.”

You never know what? I thought. You never know a lot of things. Still, it was pretty plain what she meant.

Braden was looking at me. He said, “You let anybody on your stage?”

“I don’t work for the company anymore,” I answered. I’ll admit, it was a weak-sister thing to say, but why should I stick up for Russell?

This wasn’t any of my business. He couldn’t help the ex-soldier, saying it was none of his business. All right, this was none of my business. If he wanted to act like an uncivilized person-which is what he must be and you could see it clearer all the time-then let him alone. Let him act any way he wanted.

I wasn’t his father. He was full grown. So let him talk for himself if he had anything to say.

But maybe he even thought he really was Apache. That had never occurred to me before. It would have been something to look into his mind. Not for long. Not for more than a few minutes; just time enough to look around with his eyes, around and back at things that had happened to him. That would tell you a few things.

I started to think of the stories Henry Mendez had told about Russell, piecing little bits of it together now.

How he had been Juan something living in a Mexican pueblo before the Apaches came raiding and took some of the women and children. How he had been named Ish-kay-nay and brought up by these Chiricahuas and made the son of Sonsichay, one of the sub-chiefs of the band. Five years with them and he must have learned an awful lot.

Then, after that, living in Contention with Mr. James Russell until he was about sixteen. He had gone to school there. And he had almost killed a boy in a fight. Maybe there was a good reason he did it. But he had left soon after, so maybe there wasn’t a good reason; maybe he just couldn’t be taught anything.

Then the most interesting part. How John Russell got his next name, Tres Hombres.

He had been with the mule packers on that campaign of the Third Cavalry’s, chasing down into Mexico after the bands of Chato and Chihuahua, and he got his new name in a meadow high in the Sierra Madre, two days west of the village of Tesorababi.

He had gone out looking for these mule packers who had wandered off the trail, hunting them all day and finding them, three mozos and eighteen mules, an hour before dark and a moment before the sudden gunfire came out of the canyon walls and caught them and ended four of the mules.

John Russell, who was sometimes Juan or Juanito, but more often Ish-kay-nay to the older ones of the Apache Police, shot six more of the mules in the moments that followed and he and the mozos laid behind the dead mules all night and all the next day. The Apaches, nine or ten of them, came twice. Ru