Beyond the Horizon Read online

  The stranger smiled wide and goofy, plopped himself on the ground. It was a nice enough spot for rest. They both looked at the sun; it seared high in the sky and seemed to quiver there, unmoving.

  ‘¿Alimento?’ The stranger’s pronunciation was off, a little weak.

  The Mexicano looked at him sideways—an incredulous squint. ‘Sí.’

  He moved his serape to the side and pulled out a canvas bag. He took out two strips of jerky and gave one to the stranger. The stranger bit his and chewed. The Mexicano did likewise.

  ‘Buena vista,’ the stranger said.

  Again the Mexicano nodded, said, ‘Sí.’

  The stranger looked over his shoulder at the deadened tree, the bald spot on the hillside. The limbs of the tree spread out against the sky like fractures caused from thunder blasts.

  ‘Este lugar tiene la enfermedad del muerte,’ the stranger said.

  The Mexicano looked mildly surprised at the stranger’s sudden facility with language.

  ‘¿Por qué diría usted eso?’ he asked. He took a pouch of tobacco from his boot and some rolling paper from his pocket. ‘¿Cigar?’

  The stranger smiled and declined the cigar. He pointed to the tree, to the patch of soil beneath it where the dirt was fresh packed and a few round stones lined the grave.

  ‘¿Un amigo suyo?’

  The Mexicano placed the tobacco in the paper and licked the edge. He rolled it and held it between his lips. After he lit the cigar and puffed on it a few times, he asked how long the stranger had been following him.

  This made the stranger laugh. ‘Desde el principio de tiempo,’ he said.

  The Mexicano replaced the tobacco pouch into his boot. ‘Tengo el dinero,’ he said. He knew the offer was in vain.

  The stranger stood and dusted off the seat of his pants. ‘Pase. Camine conmigo.’

  The Mexicano did as he was told and followed the stranger over to the fresh grave under the tree. A shovel crafted from a tin can lay beside the tree. Using the toe of his boot, the stranger burrowed a hole in the dirt. ‘Usted pulla.’

  It took less than a half hour for the Mexicano to excavate the grave. The sun still suspended over the site, baking everything beneath it into wrought forms. The coffin was a pine wood box buried less than a foot beneath the soil.

  ‘Ábralo,’ the stranger said.

  There was a moment of hesitation before the Mexicano complied and used his hands to claw at the slat board cover. The nails popped from the wood and the lid came loose. Inside the corpse lay face up, the skin gnarly and the clothes ragged. The body had wintered somewhere, been dead a season or two.

  ‘Sáquelo,’ the stranger said. The Mexicano protested in hurried pleadings and the stranger let him talk. Soon the Mexicano exhausted all pleadings. He stood and straddled the grave, grabbed the corpse by the shirt and hefted him up in one motion. He staggered, holding his breath until he set the corpse on the ground. For a moment, maybe more, the stranger and the Mexicano stood over the body, examining it like it might spring back to life. The Mexicano mumbled to himself and his eyes glistened with either sweat or tears or both.

  ‘¿Por qué estás haciendo esto?’ he asked.

  The stranger studied the Mexicano, his rakish serape and burlap trousers. He thought for a moment to respond, then thought better of it. He seized the Mexicano as the corpse had been handled. They fell to the ground. The Mexicano cried out and the stranger hugged his body close. Together they rolled across the ground until they fell into the empty coffin. The lid fell shut. There was a moment of darkness and the men cuddled. The stranger positioned one hand under the Mexicano’s chin. ‘¡Dios mío!’ he called. Then the stranger snapped his neck.

  ii

  The man woke with the sun baking the flat rock on the side of the mountain. Whatever mystics the night had cast on his mind were clarified now in the daylight. He looked down the slope at his mule and few supplies. All remained untouched.

  He tottered down the mountainside and packed the satchel for the mule. He went to untie the hitch that bound his animal to a tree and saw a figure out of the corner of his eye. Slowly he turned to face the man. And the man did not try to hide. Most of his head was shaved, his chest and face painted. He wore a necklace of teeth.

  ‘You an Apache?’ the man asked.

  But the Indian did not reply. There was a rustling behind the man and two more Indians emerged from the brush. One held a hand ax and wore a stovepipe hat; the other held no weapon and simply wore a loincloth made from a human scalp. In his pocket, the man felt the weight of the shiv. No one moved.

  Farther down the trail another Indian rode on a white horse. The purity of the animal struck the man as odd; he’d never seen something so clean. As the horse and rider drew closer, the man could see the Indian more clearly. He wore a suit of armor constructed out of bones. Around his torso was a ribcage and vertebrae. The crown of a skull capped his head and dark hair ran out from under it. His hands were also outfitted with bones from human hands—everything bound together with leather strings.

  The man stood still, his arms hovering at his sides. He tried to swallow some of his spit so he might speak, but his mouth was too dry. The mule tossed its head and brayed.

  The Apache chief trotted around the man and his mule and exchanged glances with the other Indians. Then he came close to the man and looked down on him with a hardened gaze. The Indian smelled like chalk, like stoneground flour, like dust and nothing.

  ‘I aint even worth killin,’ the man said.

  The Indian chief leaned forward as if he hadnt heard what the man said. The bones of his armor clacked together as he moved. The other Indians inched forward; the one raised his ax.

  ‘Your people are good,’ the man said. ‘Your kind gave my father and me passage once. We’re friends, your kind and I—we’re amigos.’

  The chief considered the words for some time as if he understood what the man said. He nodded and sat upright again. He motioned to the other Indians and they cut the mule loose from the tree. The man did not protest as they departed and took his mule with them.

  His father had called the natives friends. They had taken them to an island and fed both the boy and his father smoked fish. They drank fresh water flavored with fruits and pollen and flower petals. Still, none of the natives spoke or looked at them. It was as if for a short time they were treated as demigods. Each morning a woman naked from the waist up with teeth pierced through her nostrils left food by the shelter. She set the food on the ground on a bed of palm leaves. Tentatively she opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, but she never did. Instead she backed away with her head bowed.

  The boy saw her come and go, but the father slept through the visitations. A week passed in this fashion: father and son would walk about the island in silence, the natives always present, but never obvious. They would eat and drink their fill and nap in the afternoon. In the evenings they built a small fire from dried driftwood and fell to sleep by it. By then father and son were ready to converse as if they had spent the entirety of their day speculating what the other would say and then finding the correct answer to steer the conversation in his own direction.

  ‘Where are we?’ the boy asked his father. They sat opposite from one another by the fireside. Waves rolled in from the ocean. It seemed impossible now that those waters were in the same ocean as where they left the ship burning, the rankness of flesh cremating.

  The father said he figured them to be in the Caribbean, in the gulf somewhere. ‘Hundreds of islands round here,’ he said. ‘Dangerous routes for ships too what with the reefs and all.’

  ‘So you know where we are?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Close enough,’ his father said. ‘Stars like I never seen before down this way, stars I only seen drawn out—didnt believe they existed.’

  ‘Are we gonna leave this island?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Not certain we can,’ his father said. ‘We’d need a boat.’

  ‘Do you want
to?’ the boy asked. He clarified. ‘Leave?’

  His father stared out at the ocean, the endless horizon, the clouds and birds. ‘If we do, I think we should head inland, toward the coast. American mainland.’

  ‘Whats there?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ his father said. He dragged a stick through the sand. A minute later he asked if the boy would be all right.

  The boy didnt know what his father meant and he said he was fine.

  ‘Best to forget what you saw—forget about that place altogether,’ his father said.

  ‘Sargasso?’

  ‘Dont even say it.’

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’

  ‘Make something up.’ The father snapped the twig once, then twice and a third time. He tossed it into the fire. ‘Just make up a story and that will be what happened. What happened out there’—he pointed to the darkened horizon, out into a slate of black wind—‘that was unnatural.’

  ‘You said that was the way desperate men act.’

  Again, his father shook his head. ‘No men act that way. People dont eat—they dont stick their pricks—’ It was the only time the boy saw his father cry. ‘If we make it back to a place with laws and proper folks I’ll show you how a man acts.’

  It was night in the cliff dwelling. The stranger looked up from the bottom of the ceremonial pit, the kiva used only by the men of the Anasazi male order. First he noticed the sky, stars sprawled out. Closer to him, close enough for the heat to warm his skin, was a fire. The fire had been built in the hole in the center of the kiva; the same hole where ritual fires were set ablaze a thousand years ago. The man sat hunched by the wall, half in a stupor of sleep. The stranger stood on the other side of the flames. Yes, this was where he desired to be, to walk in step with the man. But this was too soon. The man seemed to stir from his slumber and his eyes fluttered into wakefulness.

  ‘You,’ he said. He hunched over and squinted past the light of the fire into the shadows on the other side of the pit.

  The stranger stayed quiet, knowing he appeared to the man as little more than a shadowed vision. A scarab scuttled by on the stone floor. How insignificant most of the life in this universe is. And how unwitting this insect is. Years from now philosophers would attribute the origins of the universe to a complex system of events and would credit the flap of a butterfly’s wing as the catalyst for such things.

  He stooped and plucked the bug from the ground.

  When he looked at the man again, the Indian chief—clad in his bone armor—stood at the edge of the pit looking down on the unwitting subject.

  ‘You,’ the man called again. He passed from cobwebs of dreams into full reality. The stranger crushed the bug between his thumb and forefinger as he stepped into the fire pit.

  iii

  The man took to traveling at night again, this time by foot. Since his encounter with the Apache, an uneasiness settled over his every move. He felt watched, the most intimate moments of his life interrupted by others’ voyeurism. He gauged the stars circulating above, noted a streak of white that blipped in and out of existence. The course he took kept him in a low and vulnerable spot. He looked to the rock ledges on either side of him, the pine trees nothing but wire silhouettes in the moonlight.

  Once the sun crested over the ridged peaks of the mountains, the man gave his surroundings a quick survey, then darted off the trail and into the groves of pines. He crouched by the trunk of a tree and listened. In his hand he gripped the shiv. He held his breath. Somewhere farther off—down on the trail, maybe from the yonder ledge—there was a noise. The sun kept rising, cutting through the gauzy haze of early morning. He listened for another noise but fell into sleep instead.

  He woke again when the cool damp of night stirred him from his dreams. Upon realizing he was awake, he held his breath and listened again. If there was a noise, he did not hear it. Still, he imagined the eyes of the skeleton man on the horse fixated on him from one of the ledges, his gaze able to pierce through the night. The Indians, he thought, trolled the trail behind him, picking up artifacts from his travels and destroying the prints he left in the soil. He couldnt go back onto the trail; it was too open, too visible. He resolved to keep to the forests.

  Shiv in hand, he meandered through the trees and thought little as to how the stars above him aligned with his predestined path. He came to a clearing and had the sudden urge to urinate. He put his back to a tree and placed the shiv on the toe of his boot so he could easily find it in the dark. As the urine pittered on the pine-needled ground he thought he heard something a second time. His stream weakened and he glanced around the forest. Again he felt the eyes on him.

  His father had watched him defecate on the island. The boy kicked sand over the feces as a sanitary measure.

  ‘Whats that?’ his father asked. He pointed to the clumps of turd now dusted over with sand.

  ‘Took a shit,’ the boy said. ‘Do every morning… Thought you werent up.’

  His father kept staring at the spot in the sand. His lips curled up in disgust. ‘What bout the blood?’ he asked.

  The boy shook his head, picked at his fingernails.

  ‘What about the blood in your shit?’ his father asked again.

  ‘Been like that since the first mate shoved his piece up there,’ the boy said. He stammered and felt hot when he admitted it. But he did not cry.

  His father’s throat lurched like he might vomit. If he did vomit, he swallowed it back down.

  ‘It’s better than it was,’ the boy offered.

  His father refocused his gaze on the boy. ‘Whats that?’

  ‘Aint as much blood—gets less every day.’

  His father grabbed the boy by the shoulder and forced him to the ground, pulled him by the hair to the pile of sand and feces. The father used his own hand to scoop the turds out of the sand and hold them up to the boy’s face. ‘This aint natural,’ he said. ‘You dont bleed when you shit!’ He wiped the feces on the boy’s face and it left streaks of brown and red, flecks of earth. ‘It’s not human!’

  The boy rolled over once his father loosed his grip. He cried now, writhing in the sand. His father staggered away then emptied the contents of his stomach by a palm tree. From the tree line the native chief and the half naked woman watched as silent witnesses.

  The stranger turned along the creekside trail, the path eventually parting ways from the water and lifting around the skirt of the mountain. As he walked the trail flattened, growing wider. He smelled the smoke of sulfur, manganese, bauxite. Again the trail inclined, becoming steeper. Pine tree roots irrigated and dammed the soil, creating a natural staircase up the slope. Where the pine boughs parted and looked out across the valley, the stranger stopped. A slight haze of grey hung like gauze in the air beyond the next mountain.

  The stranger focused his sights in closer on the foreground, at the adjacent mountain slope. A tailing of loosely packed till spilled out from the mountainside as an unnatural ruination of the landscape. He strained his eyes looking through the yonder pines, trying to see what he knew lay in the depths.

  In the future, steel pylons would support a span of concrete and asphalt over this gulf of space. In the valley below cigarette butts and foil wrappers would blow around like confetti. The adjacent mountain, not yet tapped for minerals, would be discovered to house a fortune in copper. Men would die by the dozens extracting the stuff of electrical transmissions and striking effigies of Honest Abe. Within a hundred and twenty years nothing would be left of the mountain. In fact a void, a pit, would be left in its place. The pit would eventually be filled with garbage added in layers and bulldozed over with dirt until a mound like those of the Miami Indian burial grounds took its place.

  It was the evolution of the world—mountains and pits and garbage. The stranger thought how odd it was that someday after the great fallout, the next generation of species would unearth the landfill thinking it to be a place of significance. They would dig through each layer finding th
e things not yet decomposed to be worth something—something at least of numismatic value, if not historical significance. History is only made by burrowing into the earth, by digging out what will become the annal crypts of our past. Just as the early archeologists extrapolated the skeletons of entire dinosaurs from a single tooth, the stranger saw that these future dwellers would use these clues to reconstruct the myth of a place and a time called America.

  How wrong they would be—America was never done being constructed. It was a ghost of a place since it was stumbled upon by Columbus or Vespucci, Saint Brendan or Leif Erikson—whichever brand of lore parents spun their children at bedtime. And after the stories were told—in our dreams—that is where America exists.

  ‘Wake up!’ his father said.

  The boy opened his eyes. His father looked down on him with eyes like a man possessed by isolation. His body moved rhythmically back and forth in a rocking motion. It took a moment before the boy realized his father straddled a body under him.

  He sat upright and pulled his legs to his chest. The body was that of the half naked woman lying face down in the sand. The food she brought them lay sprawled out across the sand floor of their lean-to. She murmured incoherently and lifted her head. His father grabbed her around the waist and hefted her pelvis back into his. Her head fell, catching a mouthful of sand. She coughed and called out.

  The boy witnessed his father insert his penis into the orifices of the woman over and over again with strange fascination. At first the woman’s hands flailed about, but her arms were too short to reach the father. Once or twice the woman almost appeared to squirm away before the father seized his grip on her again and forced his way back inside her.

  She screamed out and looked at the boy. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot. She said words that could only be pleadings for help, for mercy. But the boy sat inert.

  ‘A woman,’ his father grunted. ‘Men and women.’