The Son

by Philipp Meyer

The Lipan Apaches stopped the old conquistadores in their tracks. Then came the Comanche. The earth had seen nothing like them since the Mongols; they drove the Apaches into the sea, destroyed the Spanish Army, turned Mexico into a slave market.

There were deer, turkey, bear, squirrel, the occasional buffalo, turtles and fish from the river, ducks, plums and mustang grapes, bee trees and persimmons—the country was rich with life the way it is rotten with people today. The only problem was keeping your scalp attached.

The woods were thick as first creation

if we ever got to where the trees didn’t rub the house, we would move.

he was always stopping among the cottonwoods to rub the bud sap onto his fingers, a habit she adopted as well. Even at the end of her life she would stop at an old tree and scrape the orange sap onto a thumbnail, that she might smell it the rest of the day, and think of her great-grandfather. Balm of Gilead, someone once told her, that’s what the sap was

THERE HAD BEEN a time when this was not unusual. A time when the wealthy were exemplars. When you held yourself to a higher standard, when you lived as an example to others. When you did not parade your inheritance in front of a camera; when you did not accept the spotlight unless you’d done something. But that obligation had been lost. The rich were as anxious for attention as any scullery maid.

Beware the small man in Texas; he must be ten times meaner to survive in this land of giants.

A stone wall surrounded the yard—a leftover from the days when you fenced cows out, rather than in—

was Spindletop that had begun the automobile age and Howard Hughes, with his miraculous drill bit, who had completed it.

“Of course we are not stupid, the land did not always belong to the Comanche, many years ago it was Tonkawa land, but we liked it, so we killed the Tonkawa and took it from them . . . and now they are tawohho and try to kill us whenever they see us.

The white people are crazy. They all want to be rich, same as we do, but they do not admit to themselves that you only get rich by taking things from other people. They think that if you do not see the people you are stealing from, or if you do not know them, or if they do not look like you, it is not really stealing.”

frontiersmen considered bear meat and honey the king’s supper, but the Indians would only eat bear if there was no hoofed creature to be found.

The best shafts were grooved along their length. We used two grooves and the Lipan used four. This prevented the arrow from stanching the wound it had just cut, but it also kept the shaft from warping.

The blades of hunting arrows were fixed vertically, as the ribs of game animals are vertical to the earth. The blades of war arrows were fixed parallel to the earth, the same as human ribs. Hunting points were made without barbs and tied tightly to the shaft so they could be pulled from an animal and reused. War arrows had barbs and the blades were tied loosely, so that if the arrow was pulled, the head would remain lodged in the enemy’s body.

“They have told me there is a German named Hertz,” he said, “who has given his name to, among other things, the way flint breaks when you strike it. It is always the same way.” He held up a chip. “Though of course Hertz did not discover this. In fact the man who did discover it has been dead two million years. Which is how long people have been knocking rocks together to make tools.” He took another flake. “Remember that,” he said. “None of it’s worth a shit until you put your name on it.”

The difference between a brave man and a coward is very simple. It is a problem of love. A coward loves only himself .

CANNOT HELP having sympathy for the Mexicans. So far as their white neighbors are concerned, they come into this world coyotes in human form, and when they die they are treated like coyotes as well. My instinct is to root for them; they despise me for it. I see myself in them; they are insulted. Perhaps you cannot respect a man who has what you do not. Unless you think he might kill you. A preference for hardhanded authority seems bred into them—they are comfortable with the old relationships, patrón and peón—and any attempt to change these boundaries they find undignified, or suspicious, or weak.

Perhaps this is why I am constantly disappointed—I expect good from the world, as a puppy might. Thus, like Prometheus, I am unmade each day.

One evening, just before her lover came to her, she blackened her hands with soot from the fire, in order that she might mark his back and have her answer. In the morning, when she rose to get water for her family, she saw her handprints on the back of her favorite brother, and she cried out and fled the tribe in shame, and her brother, who had never loved anyone more, ran after her. But she would not slow down, and he could not catch her, and the two of them streaked across the earth until finally she became the sun, and her brother the moon, and they could only be in the sky together at certain times and were never again allowed to touch.

the entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement—from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

The chief who led the famous raid on Linnville in 1840 (in which a group of five hundred warriors sacked a warehouse full of fine clothing and made their escape dressed in top hats, wedding gowns, and silk shirts) was named Po-cha-na-quar-hip, meaning Cock That Stays Hard Forever. But neither this nor the more delicate translation, Erection That Will Not Go Down, could possibly be printed in newspapers, so it was decided to call him Buffalo Hump.

The Comanches were a good-natured sort and names were accepted with humor, though after Tried to Fuck a Mare got his first scalp and it was decided to change his name to Man on a Hill, he was not heard to complain.

María was at the table, reading a book. The Virginian, by Wister. “Do you like this one?” she said. “It’s not bad.” “The strong white man comes to an unpopulated wilderness and proves himself. Except there has never been any such thing.”

IT OCCURS TO me that we are entering an era in which the human ear will cease to distinguish sounds. Today I barely heard the drillers. What other things am I not hearing?

“If the Indians were left in peace . . .” He shrugged. “There would not be any trouble with them.” “May I ask where are you from?” “New York City.” “I know that, but what tribe are you from? The Senecas? The Cayugas?” The reporter shook his head. “Or perhaps you are Erie, or Mohawk, or Mohican, or Montauk or Shinnecock, or Delaware or Oneida or Onondaga. Or, my favorite, Poospatuck? I suppose they are your neighbors. Do you attend their scalp dances?” “Come off it,” said the reporter. “There are no Indians left in your part of the country because you killed them all. So we find it interesting you have such a fascination with making sure we treat ours humanely. As if, unlike the savages your grandfather wiped out, ours are thoughtful and kind.”

Most of the men she’d known were fools like her father and brothers, their lives shaped by a willful ignorance they mistook for pride.

THE WOMAN’S BOOK had come out and later was made into a movie starring James Dean. It was one long exaggeration. It made everyone look like clowns, as if they had stumbled dumbly into wealth, as if the state was nothing but backwoods tycoons without two brain cells to rub together. And yet most of the oilmen had liked it. They began to invent over-the-top mannerisms, throwing silver coins out of the windows of their limousines, taking twenty-thousand-dollar baths in champagne. Maybe it was no different from any other time. The frontier was not yet settled when Buffalo Bill began his shows and the Colonel always complained about the moment his cowboys began to read novels about other cowboys; they had lost track of which was more true, the books or their own lives.

It is as my father says. Men are meant to be ruled. The poor man prefers to associate, in mind if not in body, with the rich and successful. He rarely allows himself to consider that his poverty and his neighbor’s riches are inextricably linked, for this would require action, and it is easier for him to think of all the reasons he is superior to his other neighbors, who are just poorer than he is.

her love may prove deciduous,