1 Thatch Indian Territory was in a dry season in May of 1895, leaving Rock Creek in the Creek Nation especially shallow in its broad bed, the water steepled with rocks where turtles sunned. The three buzzards that the three men had waved away from the bank floated directly above them as if the men''s halos had loosed from their moorings from transpiration and in their haste to rise heavenward had collided to form a circling, circling chain that bound these chance souls to this moment and place, their lives to their inevitable long home--starting now. "He was there, face down in it." The white man who''d introduced himself as Lee nearly two hours earlier in Keokuk Falls pointed with a thrusting action of his rigid coat sleeve to help Bass Reeves sight the spot. "Where it''s smooth there, betwixt the froth and them two chicken turtles stacked, that''s where I drug him up from to keep him from drifting." He spat the color of wet rocks and let his arm hang at his side. "He weren''t that heavy. He might look big but really ain''t.

" Bass let his chin drop, and he eyed the clothed hump buzzing with flies. It was crisscrossed with ropes that were tied to tree branches and rocks. Eddie Reed, a young deputy Bass was mentoring, wore his neckerchief bandit-like as he stood on the slope of the bank at an angle near the water''s edge. He checked the dead man''s pockets, but a wadded handkerchief was all he found. "He smelled better this morning," Lee offered. "I reckon so," Bass said. The buzzards had flayed the back of the man''s head, ears, and neck. Surprisingly there were no signs the buzzards had pecked his hands, despite the exposed flesh of two missing fingers severed at the second joint on his right hand.

The man''s skin had begun to marble pink and white all over. He looked to be a white man. Bass strained to bend down but hesitated from the sting in his thigh. "Want him rolled over?" Eddie asked, standing over the dead man''s feet. A sock still remained where one of his boots was missing. It was a rich man''s sock. Bass nodded. "Sure could use the help today.

" He took hold of one of the ropes that wrapped around the man''s back and tugged, testing if the rope was taut enough. It was. "Come on," he said, and he and Eddie rolled the man over. The center of the man''s forehead was both concave and swollen, imprinted with a fist-shaped blow, and purple-black with a gash across the top that had long stopped bleeding and opened to redness. The skin around the gash, among the whiskers on his face, and down on his neck seemed to slide away like wet paper. Bass shifted his eyes to Lee, who was hitching up his trousers, but Lee''s gut instantly weighed them down again. "You positive this Thatch?" Bass asked. Up on his toes, Lee leaned over the body, then rocked back on his heels.

"That''s who he told me last night he was." He spat and wiped his chin and beard on his sleeve. "I was setting my traps when I come up on him in the evening time. He was stirring up something to eat for him and some sidekicker he had with him, and he say for me to join them. He introduced himself as Zachariah Thatch from Washington County, and the one who ain''t here was Jimmy Cash or something, from Arkansas, too, but from Faulkner County, he say." "If Thatch was the one cooking," Bass said, "what makes you think the one with him was working for him and not the other way?" Lee hunched his shoulders. "I don''t know, ''cause Thatch was twice as old as him and dressed and talked like he had money. I mean, Thatch was white while the younger one, Jimmy, shore wasn''t.

I mean, he was white-looking but mixed with dark. What kind a dark I couldn''t tell you. And while Thatch talked big about inspecting some land about to open for settlement in the Kickapoos, Jimmy was quiet on it. Course, I got family in Washington County, so me and this dead man here did most of the talking about some apple growers we knowed in Georgetown. I guess you know it by Lincoln." Bass gazed blankly. "Know it by the apples." "Best anywheres," Lee said.

Bass nodded. "Anything else you recall?" Lee''s eyes seemed to fix on the handkerchief wad on a patch of grass. "His friend say he just got back from Keokuk Falls. His head was bobbing like a cork he was so sour, while this one here didn''t act like he drank a drop. Didn''t smell like he did, anyhow." Eddie took a step closer as if to join the conversation, but Bass had never known him to be much of a talker in the company of others. "Which saloon did he say?" Bass asked. "Red Dog.

He talked about a shooting there. That a man died dueling a colored lawman. He was laughing about it." Bass turned to Thatch and studied his milky, bloodshot eyes. He eased down on his good knee and waved flies away with his hat, then pressed his fingertips against the man''s forehead, around the gash, feeling the give and listening to the bits of skull crackle. "That was in the evening you saw them, you say?" "That''s right," Lee said as Bass lifted a branch off of Thatch''s chest to look for holes in his clothes. "Weren''t dark yet but getting there. The two shots I heard come later.

I was in my own camp by then." Bass tipped one of the rocks on its side as if he were hunting underneath for worms in the man''s heart. "Like pow pow?" he asked. "No," Lee said. "Like pow . pow. Like enough time for a bad shot to jump up closer, you know?" Bass lowered the rock back down, and with his Sheffield Bowie knife, he began cutting rope. Eddie freed the weights from the rope and tossed them aside.

A rock tumbled into the water while Bass unbuttoned the man''s shirt. Not until Bass had unfastened the man''s trousers did he find what appeared to be a .38 entry hole, like a new navel, a few inches below his original one. Bass squinted up at the dark silhouette of Lee''s head, like a hole itself in that sunny sky--the buzzards so slow around that hole to almost be flies crawling. "Guessing you was that colored lawman," Lee said. Bass nodded. "I ain''t the white one that died." "But he got you, I see.

" Bass shut his eyes and took a deep breath despite what the air over this decaying dead man smelt like. Getting shot for the first time in his life was not something he was proud of. He took up his knife. "God allows the devil to have his luck." Lee chuckled. "The other one drawed first, didn''t he? Don''t that make you the lucky one?" Bass rested the point of the six-inch blade on Thatch''s entry wound. "Fear''ll make a body move quick, sure true." He pressed the blade down and wiggled it back and forth as it sank and as he felt for the slug in that bloated belly flesh, soft as curd.

"But quick ain''t the whole of it, you know?" Bass said. "I tried to warn the boy. Sure he was real fast, just like he said, uh-huh. But like a lot of ''em, he couldn''t shoot both fast and straight." Once the blade disappeared up to the brass cross guard, Bass eased up on the pressure, and the blade rose back out almost on its own accord. Then he tried again by going perpendicular to the previous puncture mark. "Jesus," Lee said. "You gotta have it?" "Maybe, maybe not," Bass said.

"But I want it." He wiggled the knife back and forth again as he continued to press it down deep, still not feeling that hard button of lead, so he pulled the blade out just a little, until he had good leverage with it, then pried the belly fat out of the body, spilling it in chunks, like a congealed flower of head cheese. He laid the knife on the ground beside him and searched through the fat with his fingers until he found it: a .38 slug of lead the size of a pearl. He reached for his knife, stood upright, and limped to the water''s edge to rinse his hands, knife, and the bullet that might or might not prove that the young man Zachariah Thatch had invited to accompany him on his travels had murdered