He kicked, then kicked again and suddenly pulling and swaying with all his weight he cursed, strained and drew it back. The Devil’s foot moved a few inches and lay still.
“Hell,” Wade caught his breath, “they’re harmless.”
“I told you. But, Wade,” the fingers pressed, relaxed, “go get him for me.”
The red wagon stood at the end of the street. Now and then a volley of firecrackers burst from a huddle of black braided Indians and with a dismal but high pitched cry they scattered, then returned panting toward the wagon. Or a single brave, eyes closed and ankle shoes clumping in the dust, would break from the rest and race with terrified showy speed away from the leaning red spectacle of the traveling house, straight up the center of the empty street.
The fireworks were old. Hoarded in leantos and one room cabins among families of fifteen children and ancient long haired eagle men, they were unearthed, armfuls brought into the street, supplied by bareback riders with pockets stuffed, lathered in haste. The paper cartridges exploded with stored energy or fizzled dangerously in clouds of smoke, the breath of a long horned animal on its knees. Above the clamor of the young men — their legs worked to the rattling of dry stones — the oldest Indian alive, without eyes, chin wrinkled into the mouth, clothed in baggy coat on the shoulders of which scraped his yellowed hair, stood rigidly still and, smiling or grimacing, waved in jerky circles a hissing sparkler.
One of the runners who had left with shouts and returned in a low scuffle, emerged from the alleys between the main buildings of Clare and quietly, whispering, crept to the front of the wagon to hold a bag of gray kernels under the strange horse’s nose. Suddenly it thrashed its tail and ate.
The women of the tribe were waiting. Just beyond range of a sooted and yellow lantern that had been lighted, fanned, and set crookedly near the pair of weathered steps dropped on hinges from the back of the wagon, they bundled together and their brown skeletal cheekbones now and then twitched with pain. Their blank eyes turned upwards to the low but thick red door.
The wagon consisted of four rear wheels, extra high, and a little two windowed hut daubed with one barn color coat of paint. A tin chimney, that could be removed and wired to the side, stuck abruptly from the center of the sharp pointed roof and poured a fresh, foreign smelling smoke into the hot night air. It mixed with whiffs of gunpowder. Large, outsized shutters, stolen from a Victorian estate and thick enough to be bulletproof, were nailed across the windows. The house wagon was rough, gaudy, a small fortress of unmatched parts, with an air about it of harsh and lonely ill-repute. It was a cramped and wandering hovel. Yet high over the horse’s sloping rump, the driver’s seat was draped with a soft silk-haired sheepskin. The dirty but comfortable curls hung to the floorboards and over the rusty springs.
Fat, hands in pockets, grinning, Wade worked his way down the street, careful to keep in shadow. He knew the Indians could see him, the wet shirt and trousers white. He stayed in the dark. For a time he sat, a drunk rolled in a corner, on an empty porch of the provisional store, resting. He saw a tin can blown suddenly into the air. The sharp-mouthed Indians leapt across the street to the sound of beating drums. He chuckled quietly from deep beneath his leather belt, watched them burn down, tormented by the moon.
Wade again crept lumbering toward the hut on wheels. The thin stick of the chimney turned a spotted orange. In a row of gray false fronts, among a few gilt lettered windows — a town laid out and staged with a few hundred people on the plains — the red wagon took its crooked place like a bloody thorn, an impudent shambles in the midst of cattle houses. It had not been driven to the side but blocked the road.