Beyond the Horizon Page 17

  ‘No hay razón para que usted me detiene aquí,’ the woman said.

  ‘Havin you here is a godsend,’ the man said. ‘I was content to live out the rest a my life alone.’

  They sat in the hovel and the woman inspected her surroundings—the pan with the low light of a grease wick, the slat and dirt floor, the canvas walls. Outside night had long since fallen. ‘No debemos quedarnos aquí,’ she said.

  ‘Someday I’ll build you a place right here,’ the man promised. ‘Place with walls and a proper door—a couple rooms.’

  The woman reclined and rubbed her abdomen.

  ‘Everything alright?’ the man asked. Any action denoting pain prompted this reaction from the man. The woman closed her eyes and laid her head on the wad of sail that served as her pillow.

  ‘La mayoría de los hombres no les importan si estoy embarazada,’ she said. ‘Me dicen que soy una mujer suelta.’

  The man scooted across the floor and stroked her forehead. ‘That sounds good,’ he said.

  ‘Dijeron que a los hombres todavía les gustan los cenos. Dijeron que sería mi especialidad.’

  The man nodded knowingly and shushed her. Then he lay next to her, watching her breathe until the flames in the pan flickered and extinguished altogether.

  The Chief led the men through smelters and deserts, gulched places where cacti lorded over them like structures of ancient men. He took them in and out of the folds of mountains. They waded across streams, swam across rivers. When they encountered a wagon with a light-skinned family riding into the steppes of the mountains, they rode in from all sides, the Chief on his white horse. With nowhere to go, the man driving the wagon stopped, reached under the bench and pulled out a bullwhip. The woman touched her forehead, stomach and each shoulder, clasped her hands. She hurriedly said a few words. The children covered their faces.

  When nothing was left of the family, the Indians burned the wagon and continued on. They trooped deep into the woods and found a duck trap—a contraption of thin sticks bound together with cord. The Chief ordered the Indians to watch the creek. The next day a man dressed in furs, wearing a beaver tail as a bib, came and checked the trap. The Chief stood on the opposite bank of the creek.

  The duck trapper hardly started when he noticed the Chief. ‘Je peux échanger,’ he said and showed off a vest of deerskin. ‘J’ai obtenu...’

  The Chief watched in mild amusement as the man twirled like a dancer and pointed to his moccasins, saying they were made from coon hide. He watched the facade of the duck trapper crumble. He looked at the trap in the water. ‘Si vous me permettez de m’en aller, je vous,’ he said, ‘donne tout ce que j’ai.’

  In time all languages sound the same—in a million years the hooting and baying of a caveman sounds the same as the romance of a European tongue.

  ‘Il ne travaille pas comme ça,’ the Indian said.

  The duck trapper looked up just as one of the tribesmen crept behind him and dropped a rock on his head. His eyes bruised over immediately and blood spilled out of his ears. He smelled of shit. The Indians undressed him and floated his body down the river.

  Killings of this sort became more and more common over the years. Every now and again, a fellow might put up a fight and mortally wound one of the tribesmen. For the most part though, men realize when their time is up and they simply resign their last living moments to degradation—always crying and begging, their bowels letting loose and them laying face down in the dirt.

  Such was the case with the cabin near a mineshaft deep in the mountains. A few men bunked inside and cursed at one another. Had they not kept a lantern burning inside, the Indians might have passed them by. Now they circled the cabin. The one with an ax knocked the door from its hinges. The men inside, who until a moment ago were bragging about their hunting kills and how many women they had bedded, shrieked. One covered his face like the children of the wagon and peed himself. When they were finished with the cabin, the Indians laid what they could of the men in their bunks, shut what was left of the door and shoved the cabin over the precipice.

  Some time later, the Indians watched from a ledge as a man on a mule passed below. They rode down from the ledge and crept up on the man. He rode with his eyes closed, seemingly asleep, then momentarily waking. The Indians stalked him for days and watched his paranoia mount. On their second day of following the man, he hid in the woods, then scrambled up a steep slope to sleep on a perch.

  When the man awoke and came down to his mule, the Indians were waiting for him. The man bumbled and made the usual pleadings, saying he wasnt worth killing. He was right, of course. Most people, as the Chief knew, didnt deserve anything they received. Then the man called them friends—amigos. The Chief drew near and examined the man as one might examine their destiny in the stars. The words that passed from the man’s mouth were not his own, but borrowed from another person in another time. He signaled to his tribesmen to take the mule; they would follow this man to the ends of the earth.

  In his office, the commandante sat in the chair at his desk. His time was near. He took the box containing the pistol from the desk drawer and the census book from the bookcase. Without much time he had to work quickly. He drew the knife from his boot and cut vigorously at the pages in the book until he had hollowed a spot big enough to house the box. After concealing the box in the book and placing it back in the bookcase, he removed the lanyards with the keys from around his neck and put them into the desk drawer. The usual thoughts of a man in his final hours circulated through the commandante’s mind. He told himself that it wasnt supposed to be this way. There was a plan for him.

  Outside he could hear the muted pandemonium. He exited the office and the noise grew. The others atop the wall shouted down a blow by blow account of the village’s destruction to their comrades. One foolish soldier opened the slot in the gate to watch the mayhem himself and an Indian slopped a bucket of hot oil through the hole and scorched the man’s face. He collapsed to the ground, screaming and clawing at his eyes. The Indian ran away and the others shut the slot. A fellow soldier took out his saber and lanced his burnt comrade through the heart.

  The commandante walked up to the lieutenant. ‘Place looks empty,’ he said.

  ‘Most all the civilians is down in the mine, diggin like you told em.’

  The commandante sighed, said he wished they would hurry up. Then he ordered the soldiers to open the gate, let him out. No one moved.

  ‘Ya dont wanna go out there,’ the lieutenant said.

  ‘I know it.’ The commandante stared straight ahead as if he could see through the gate. ‘Let me out and bolt the gate behind me.’

  The lieutenant exchanged glances with his fellow soldiers. ‘Alright, sir,’ he said. ‘Whats the password gonna be to git back in?’

  This made the commandante chuckle. ‘Wont be comin back in,’ he said. He waved his hand and the soldiers hefted the doors open. The world outside—the noise, dust and smoke—blasted through the aperture like a blast furnace. The commandante readied his dagger and stepped out from the fort.

  iv

  In the mines the men toiled—clearing boulders and shoveling the graveled remains of boulders. Wisps of dirt feathered down from overhead. They moved without regard for the integrity of the tunnel, without care of taking their loads atop. Soon they had nearly sealed themselves in the passage. The man used his spud bar to knock a path through the rocks in case they needed to retreat.

  ‘Hurry up,’ a miner yelled.

  Another shouted for them all to be quiet over and over again until they lowered their voices to groveling and the miner tapped on the sheet of piled boulders with his hammer. Somewhere in the depth beyond an echo called out its hollow message, each time repeating lower and lower until it disappeared into the abyss completely. As soon as the noise faded, the men snapped back into action, working at twice the pace they had before. Some men, upon finding a pocket of loose-packed rocks, straddled their find and dug with both hands like dogs. O
ne man in the backswing of his hammer clubbed a man in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Another, who had worked and become a brawny fellow by slaving in the mines, wedged a spud bar into a crack, gripped a mallet with both hands and brought his entire force down on the tool. The hairline fissure scattered and spread. He struck it again and pebbles fell like rain on all who worked. He struck the bar a third time and the stones gave way. A hollow rattle of rocks falling into the sealed corridor brought on another sustained silence amongst the men.

  Suddenly there was a concussive blast—first a flash of light, then a gust of wind and finally the roar and heat. The men near the opening were shredded by the force of the air and vestiges of their flesh flew back on the other men. The walls buckled and the ceiling caved in.

  The Chief and his men followed the man at a distance. The man seemed to know he was being watched. He traveled incessantly, at all hours of the day, at different paces. The Indians pursued. From distant perches, the tribesmen signaled one another, triangulating the man’s whereabouts. They kept a distance substantial enough to ensure the man peace of mind. Still his actions grew more paranoid.

  He climbed a steep cliffside using handholds and footholds left by ancient Indians—now all extinct. He wormed through the tunnels of the plateau, the Chief and his men circulating through the forests below, straining to catch a glimpse of their prey. They finally spied him, a good long while later, when he fell from a hole in the cave wall into the abandoned Indian village.

  The Indians camped without a fire. The tribesmen asked their Chief what they should do. Without an inflection in his voice, the Chief said they would return the mule to the man; he would need the beast to arrive at their destination.

  One Indian asked when they would know they had arrived. It had been a billion years since the Chief had seen his home. When we all converge, the Chief said, scratching at the edge of his skullcap—thats when we’ve arrived. I’ll take the mule to the man and see if he is alone.

  Another asked what would happen if the man was not alone.

  He may be in the worst position out of all of us then, the Chief replied.

  As soon as he passed through the gate of the fort into the village, the commandante turned to his left and stabbed an Indian through the back of the hand. The Indian cried out in pain and the commandante pulled the blade out and swiped the blade in a long arc, nearly decapitating the man.

  Around him most of the village was already in ruins, bodies, parts of bodies strewn in the streets. Fires contained and dying now put out more smoke than light. Somewhere in a distant reach of the city a baby wailed. A dog tramped down an alleyway. The commandante turned around and looked up at a soldier keeping watch from the top of the wall. The soldier pointed to a building, made another gesture with his hand.

  Without any further exchange the commandante went to the building, kicked in the door. There was no one inside. He looked up at the slatwood ceiling, saw the shadowed feet standing above him. But these were not the feet of the Chief. Quietly he exited through a window. He slunk down an alley, stepping over a rotten corpse—only a rag of a scalp and leathered skin covered the skeleton. Whatever organs the man died with had long since been harvested. The teeth were already pulled from his mouth.

  The baby stopped crying. It was a sudden thing. The commandante turned onto a main street, stepping over the body of the former commander. It looked as if he had bled out from the leg. The dog that passed by once doubled back and sniffed at the corpse’s crotch, lapped at the congealed blood.

  ‘Git,’ the commandante said and the dog loped onward, stopping at another corpse briefly and then continuing on.

  He came to the edge of the village, where it opened up onto the flat pan of the plateau. The commandante scanned the horizon, then looked back toward the fort. It blurred in the fans of the flames, a gauze of smoke muted the febrile blast of the sun. The commandante cleared his throat and called out, said there wasnt room for the both of them in this here town. He thought he would laugh at his own joke, but he didnt.

  ‘Cant say you look the same,’ the Chief said.

  The commandante spun around. The Chief squatted beside a pile of bricks that used to be a shed of sorts. The bone armor was less white than it had been, stained now with blood and soot.

  ‘You look different too,’ the commandante said.

  The Chief stood, gripped a broken adobe brick in his hand. The skeleton hand wrapped around his hand. ‘It was about right here, wasnt it?’ the Chief asked. ‘The pit, I mean.’

  For some reason the commandante found himself unable to speak. His mouth was dry. He cleared his throat again, blinked until his eyes watered. He asked in a foreign tongue if the Indian knew what happened next.

  ‘Ja.’ The Indian gave a single nod. ‘Doe u?’

  ‘Nro,’ the commandante admitted in yet another language.

  ‘You thought you did.’

  The commandante nodded. The two men sauntered toward each other, both moving disjointedly—one because of his armor, both from age. When they came close enough the commandante jabbed the knife at the Indian and the blade glanced off the arm bone. The Indian countered by striking a blow to the head with his skeleton fist. The force was enough to break the bones free of the lanyards. The commandante tried to stab the Indian between the ribs, but lodged the blade into the ribs of the armor. The Chief brought the brick down on the commandante’s face and slaked the flesh clean from his cheekbone, exposing most of the ball of his eye. Whatever noise the commandante made it was not a scream, nor was it a moan—it was something in between. The Chief struck him again; this time a more direct blow. He felt the bone of the skull give and turn mushy. The commandante’s body began to shake and his one good eye spun around.

  Then the Indian realized that the commandante’s body was not the only thing shaking. The ground rumbled. From inside the walls of the fort a plume of smoke rose up. The scaffolding around the mine lift collapsed.

  ‘Querido dues,’ the Chief cursed. He looked down on the commandante. What was left of his mouth turned up in a smile. The Chief struck a third blow and killed the commandante.

  ‌

  ‌Last

  One

  i

  Deep in the mine the stranger had been sleeping as he had for decades now. He lay recumbent in his bed of dynamite, thinking of the man. He had lived the entirety of the man’s existence in his head and replayed his favorite parts of the man’s life. He recalled how the man lay next to the woman, listening to her whisper in her sleep, watching her brow twitch and her limbs deftly move, her eyelids fluttering as if she threatened to retreat from the dream. In his mind the man tried to imagine what she was dreaming, if she was thinking of him. She wasnt of course.

  Another memory: the woman undressed by the stream. The man had taken her there as he was afraid to leave her alone. At first the fear was that she might run away. Then, after some time, the fear of her leaving under duress became the mounting anxiety. They spent their days with each other. When the man walked to the stream, she walked with him, her hands clasped under her protruding belly.

  ‘This here,’ the man said, pointing to the slough. ‘This was where I decided this was a good nuff place to settle. I went to the top a that hill there and looked out in all directions. Didnt see nothing cept grass. Like bein out on the ocean.’

  The woman let her fingers slide apart, leaving only her right hand under the womb. She grabbed the man’s hand and laced her fingers into his. The man started for a moment, thinking she might be trying to convey something urgent. He looked at her, but she kept her gaze downcast and a dimple welled in her cheek.

  ‘It’s like the ocean,’ the man said again. ‘Cept here you can walk on the water. Aint no place for you to get stuck, caint fall in.’

  They came to the stream’s edge and the woman let his hand go. He stood dumbfounded for a moment, watching her wade shin deep into the water. She bent over and pulled out some pebbles, examined them in the su
n. The man went to the mule and untethered the beast from one of the saplings. When he turned around, the woman pulled her tunic over her head. She stood completely naked in the creek, cupping water and washing her body. She hummed.

  As some people do in confusing situations, the man froze. She lifted her hair back, exposing the nape of her neck. It occurred to the man that this was a part of her he had never seen. Strangely enough, he did not think this of her breasts, full and sagging, the nipples brown. Nor did this thought occur when he saw her rub her sex with handfuls of water.

  After she washed, she put the tunic back on and walked toward their hovel. The man followed, running to catch up with her. He nicked his ankle on some driftwood and the woman patched his wound that evening, kissing the mark after the blood had dried.

  The couple weeks that followed were filled with more touching and kissing. The man eventually placed his mouth on hers. As he was unsure what to do, she took over, her tongue roving over his teeth and tongue. She whispered to him in her strange language, her eyes avoiding his.

  The man said he loved her too.

  ‘Usted me puede tener si desea,’ the woman said. She took the man’s hand and moved it over her body, down under the womb and between her legs.

  The man pulled his hand away. He was shaking. ‘Whats gotten you riled up?’ he asked. ‘We caint do that with a baby in there.’

  ‘Es fino,’ the woman assured him. ‘Metélo. No le va a causar daño al bebé—lo he hecho antes.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Dont want to be one a your misters. I wanna be your husband. We could raise that baby like it was ours—yours and mine.’ He didnt know what else to say, if the woman even understood what he said. He threw the blanket door aside and went outside to look at the stars. The woman followed. The lantern within their hovel illuminated the structure. It could be seen from a dozen miles away.