The Goodbye

She told me in the spring of 1861 that she was going to ride with Cochise.

She told me the way she always told me things she had already decided: plainly, without preface, watching my face to see what I would do with the information. I had learned, over a hundred and sixty years of friendship, that the watching was not waiting for permission. It was measuring whether I understood.

I understood.

The Bascom Affair had happened in February: an Army officer had called Cochise and several of his chiefs to answer for a cattle raid none of them had committed. Cochise had cut through the tent wall and escaped while they were shooting at him. Two of his family members were taken. Violence had followed; more violence had followed the violence; that was the shape of it, the shape it always took when the government wanted something from people who had given everything there was to give. Sings had watched this particular shape unfold before. She had watched it for a hundred and eighty years.

She had decided she was done watching.

I told her I understood. She said she knew. We stood there for a while in the Tucson morning, which was something we had gotten good at.

I have been separated from her before. A hundred years of the pirate century. Thirty years between Nassau and New Orleans. She had always come back; we had always found each other again without particular ceremony. I held that fact in my mind deliberately, turning it over, reminding myself of its factual accuracy.

It helped. It did not help enough.

She left on a morning I was not awake for, as she had to. She left a note, which was not her usual way, and which I understood was a gift. The note said: I will come back.

I believed her.

I had no reason not to believe her. She had always come back before.

That is the thing about a faith built across a hundred and sixty years of evidence: when the evidence finally fails, it fails completely, and you are left holding a hundred and sixty years of proof for something that turned out not to be true.

I believed her.

I put the note in the drawer where I keep the doubloons.

I still have it.