“You knew I’d show up, you little rascal,” shit that Whappo is such a caution. Always baiting his master in hopes of getting a leather-keen stripe or two across those dusky Afro-Scandinavian buttocks, which combine the callipygian rondure observed among the races of the Dark Continent with the taut and noble musculature of sturdy Olaf, our blond Northern cousin. But this time Crutchfield only turns back to watching the distant mountains. Whappo sulks. His top hat reflects the coming holocaust. What the white man does not have to utter, however casually, is anything like “Toro Rojo’s gonna be riding in tonight.” Both pardners know about that. The wind, bringing them down that raw Injun smell, ought to be enough for anybody. Oh God it’s gonna be a shootout and bloody as hell. The wind will be blowing so hard blood will glaze on the north sides of the trees. The redskin’ll have a dog with him, the only Indian dog in these whole ashen plains—the cur will mix it up with little Whappo and end hung on the meathook of an open meat stall in the dirt plaza back in Los Madres, eyes wide open, mangy coat still intact, black fleas hopping against the sunlit mortar and stone of the church wall across the square, blood darkened and crusting at the lesion in his neck where Whappo’s teeth severed his jugular (and maybe some tendons, for the head dangles to one side). The hook enters in the back, between two vertebrae. Mexican ladies poke at the dead dog, and it sways reluctantly in the forenoon market-smell of platanos for frying, sweet baby carrots from the Red River Valley, trampled raw greens of many kinds, cilantro smelling like animal musk, strong white onions, pineapples fermenting in the sun, about to blow up, great mottled shelves of mountain mushroom. Slothrop moves among the bins and hung cloths, invisible, among horses and dogs, pigs, brown-uniformed militia, Indian women with babies slung in shawls, servants from the pastel houses farther up the hillside—the plaza is seething with life, and Slothrop is puzzled. Isn’t there supposed to be only one of each?

A. Yes.

Q. Then one Indian girl…

A. One pure Indian. One mestiza. One criolla. Then: one Yaqui. One Navaho. One Apache—

Q. Wait a minute, there was only one Indian to begin with. The one that Crutchfield killed.

A. Yes.

Look on it as an optimization problem. The country can best support only one of each.

Q. Then what about all the others? Boston. London. The ones who live in cities. Are those people real, or what?

A. Some are real, and some aren’t.

Q. Well are the real ones necessary? or unnecessary?

A. It depends what you have in mind.

Q. Shit, I don’t have anything in mind.

A. We do.