Beyond the Horizon Read online

  The boy and his father were shown to the town’s boarding house. They were given a room on the second floor. The woman who took them there did not speak to them; she simply unlocked the door and ushered them inside. Clothes lay on the bed—some for the boy, some for his father. At the far end of the room there was a door that led out onto a balcony. The window by the bed provided the same view. The walls were washed grey, the plaster chipping away from the lath.

  The boy took a step toward the bed, toward the door and window. The floorboards creaked. Outside, the vista opened up across the ocean. Any lands beyond here were non-existent, swallowed in the tides.

  ‘This gonna be our home?’ the boy asked.

  His father walked past him and sat down on the bed, pulled off his boots. The rank odor of sweat and mildew soured the air. ‘Reckon it’s as good a place as any,’ he said.

  Reaching his destination gave the man extra strength. He entered the town proper under his own power. When he dismounted the mule, he led it by the bridle. Short flattened structures made of adobe bricks, walls buttressed with scraps of driftwood, lined the long barren patches of soil demarcating the streets. A shack made of tin metal wafted flames inside, a wiry man swinging a mallet against a giant metal slab. His foot pumped a bellows and the inside of the shop glowed like the annals of our molten world before it cooled into rock.

  ‘¡Tenemos bolsas de comida!’ a woman with a dead eye called out. ‘Usted está cansado. Coma. ¡Coma!’

  Street urchins called out from under their blanket awnings. ‘Puedo decirle su fortuna,’ one called out. The man shook his head.

  A plank wood building with an oil sheet over the window holes appeared to be the most established place. The man set his course for it.

  ‘You there,’ a man called from atop one of the buildings. He stood a full body height above the man. ‘You sellin that mule?’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘I thinks you are.’

  ‘I caint,’ the man said weakly.

  Some dark-skinned boys ran through the streets between the clusters of vendors and mendicants, the urchins and vagabonds. One stopped and stroked the mule’s mane.

  ‘Give you ten pounds coffee, five pounds lard for that mule,’ the roofman said. He put his hands on his hips.

  Again the man said he couldnt sell the animal. He began to explain how he needed the mule, how he would only be here for a day or two, but he was interrupted by the boy cursing. ‘¡Su caballo sucio mordió la mano!’ The boy doubled over, holding his hand to the core of his body. A cloaked woman ran to the boy. He cursed again.

  ‘He nip ya?’ the man asked.

  Some of the boy’s friends, in noticing their playmate’s absence, circled back around to the scene. The woman swaddled the boy in her cloak, whispered to him.

  ‘If you dont trade me that donkey,’ the roofman said. The man turned his back on the roofman, but the roofman kept talking. ‘If you dont want to deal, I can foller you to wherever youre asleepin and I’ll steal im from ya.’

  Before the man could turn around to respond, the old woman shoved him. The roofman laughed.

  ‘Cortaré el pene si mi hijo se muere de la septicemia,’ she said.

  ‘Su hijo es una molestia en nuestro pueblo fascinante bruja vieja,’ the roofman called to the woman.

  The woman’s eyes sharpened. ‘Y usted no nos sirve para nada. Háganos un favor y deje que este señor se le mate,’ she hissed. Then she spat on the ground and pointed up at the man. Without another word, she whisked the boy away.

  The roofman turned his attention back to the man. ‘I’ll kill you too.’

  The man blinked. ‘You’ll kill me?’

  ‘Cut your throat open.’

  The man stood long in the bustle of the road, smoke and children swarming around him. He collected his thoughts. Somewhere farther on, people were singing. He tried to locate the source of the noise.

  ‘Need my mule,’ he finally said. He looked up to where the roofman had been standing. Now he was gone.

  He waited a moment for the man to resurface. From across the street, the old woman and the boy with the bitten hand glared at him. He tugged at the mule’s bridle and they continued gravitating to the slatwood building.

  ‘Hey-a mister,’ a woman with olive skin and pocked cheeks called from a doorway. She pulled at the crotch of her dress. ‘Queira ter um fogo entre as suas pernas?’ She licked her lips and pulled an armstrap of her dress down to expose her breast. ‘Faça-o muito. Faça-o vir duas vezes.’

  The man looked away, to the other side of the street. The woman called at him again, but her words were lost in the din of the street. A man with little hair on his face and a flattened top hat stood on a wooden block. He had a black boy on the block with him. ‘Miracles and wonders!’ he called. The man stopped to see whom the auctioneer addressed. But the streets kept moving, no one paying him any mind. ‘This boy, blind from birth, will see today.’ He leaned forward, the boy motionless at his side. ‘How, you ask? My secret formula—the base a mud dredged from the Rio Mancos and the ancient healing ways of the wild Indian, strong enough to sap a snakebite, potent enough to scar over a bullet wound. Now people always ask me the same thing: does it work? And the answer is yes; it most definitely does.

  ‘Yes, friends, I have done my time in the cavalry, been to old Mexico, shot a few Indians and cured a few men. In fact this medicine recipe was given to me by an Indian shaman on his deathbed…’

  The man pressed on, uncertain where he could stop for respite, where he might be safe. The slatwood building seemed less promising the closer the man came to it. A gap between two buildings provided a dark alleyway and passage to a quieter section of town, a part obscured by these structures. Halfway through the slotted path the man noticed a Mexican slumped against the wall, apparently asleep. He nudged the Mexican with his boot. He did not stir. The man knelt down and shook the Mexican by the shoulder. Only then did the man notice the stab wounds in the Mexican’s torso.

  ‘You,’ a voice called down. The man craned his head straight back, mouth a-yawp, to look directly above him. He recognized the voice instantly. It was the roofman.

  ‘You kill that dirty sumbitch?’

  ‘No,’ the man said. ‘I jus found him.’

  ‘Like hell,’ the roofman called down. ‘You probably got his blood all over ya. I could call for the law and theyd flog ya right to death tomorra morn. They’ll do that if you cut the heart out of a man.’

  The man looked at the Mexican’s body, realizing for the first time just how concave the chest cavity appeared. Blood, still warm, continued to soak through the garments.

  ‘You do this?’ the man asked.

  The roofman laughed. ‘What—How’d I do that? I’m up here. One of youse down there did that. Probably some other Mexicano hiding just down the alleyway a piece. Waitin to gut you, dry your guts out and sell em to an injun.’

  The man looked down the alleyway. Pockets of darkness shrouded either side. Only a dusky haze marked where it opened up on the other side.

  ‘Leave the mule,’ the roofman said. ‘Leave him and I wont call out for the law. Just go back out the way you come in. I’ll see to it that you dont get cut up.’

  The man continued staring off into the shadows. He looked back in the direction whence he came. It was also blinding, but in a different way. He could hear the mishmash of voices. He let the mule’s reins fall from his hand and he crawled on all fours under the animal. As he stood to run he could hear the roofman’s laughter echoing through the channel behind him.

  ii

  Simple deduction led the stranger to the well. If a civilization had been in this place before, then there was surely a source of water. He closed his eyes and smelled the air. In his mind, he thought of another time, when he decided to kill the buzzard and dive down into the rubble of the tower. There had been water in there, near the bottom. How the Indians of ancient times came to know there was an aquifer here was beyond him.
He drank deeply from the waters. Then he stripped off his clothes and bathed. This far down and sheltered as he was, there was little light. This place was cold and he shivered. He dunked his clothes, wrung them out, then waterlogged them again.

  He slogged his sopping clothes back to the surface. First he rolled in the dust, letting the dirt stick to his wet skin. He appeared as another color. Then he took his clothes and wrung them out into the soil. He squatted so the tip of his penis grazed the ground. He used a stick to mix the water and dirt together and slopped the concoction into the wooden box.

  The sun beat down on the hot flat pan of the rubbled village. The mud on the stranger’s skin dried and cracked, peeled up. Meanwhile the brick also baked. But unlike the stranger’s flesh, which boiled and blistered, softening with sweat, the mud hardened.

  At dusk, when the sun was finished with this place, the stranger used the mixing stick to pull the rectangle of mud from the wooden case. He held it up for inspection. In the evening sun, the whitened block of mud glowed red, like this brick was pulled from the forges of an infernal world.

  In time he had piles of bricks. He wandered the horizons to the north and south, to the east and inevitably to the west. There he gathered more boards, some lengths of burlap, a handful of metal rivets. He found the bones of a dead steer, picked clean by vultures, bleached by the sun. He took only the cow skull, figuring the brain cavity to be a good mortar, the horns a possible tool.

  From his findings the stranger was able to make another set of casks to dry bricks. Now he could set six bricks at a time. On hotter days he could fire two sets of bricks in a day. While the mud dried he took the horns and scraped down the old Indian adobe bricks and fashioned them into more rectangular objects. The stranger trapped mice and snakes, buzzards, and cooked them in the sun alongside the bricks. He ate them and tossed their bones and innards into the well. Still he drank those same waters.

  iii

  The quieter side of town was no less rambunctious than the market side of town. Several wagons lined the street. A large brickwalled structure with a wooden gate appeared to be the hub of activity. The gate opened and closed often, men in uniforms carrying out pallets of dry goods, crates with different color dots of paint on them.

  ‘You there,’ a soldier called. He pointed at the man. ‘Give us a hand.’

  The man did as he was told and grabbed the edge of the pallet they were hoisting up onto the back of a wagon.

  ‘Man just stole my mule,’ he said.

  ‘Lift on three,’ the soldier said.

  He counted out loud and they hefted the pallet up the rest of the way and onto the wagon. ‘Get it outta here,’ the soldier called to the wagon driver. ‘Commandante says he wants it there in three days’ time. Best not to disappoint him.’

  ‘Think the fella that stole my mule also killed a man.’

  ‘A soldier?’

  ‘A Mexican.’

  The soldier shrugged and turned back to the outgoing cargo.

  ‘Need my mule to get back to my wife.’

  This gave the soldier pause. ‘Get back?’

  ‘I’m just here to register my family for the century.’

  ‘You dont got a job?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You dont work here, work in Fort James?’

  ‘Caint say I do. I’m just here to register my family.’

  The soldier laughed. ‘Ever mans got a job, got something he does.’

  ‘I do,’ the man insisted. ‘I’m here to register my family.’

  ‘Need a job, friend. Commandante will see to that.’ He pointed over the man’s shoulder. ‘That your mule?’

  The beast wandered in the street and the man ran to it, looking at the rooftops around him.

  Not long after the boy and his father settled into their quarters, there was a knock at the door. The innkeeper and his father talked in a low tone and the conversation ended with the innkeeper giving his father a pair of metal hooks with wooden handles. His father tossed the hooks on the bed, walked to the opposite door and out onto the balcony. The boy followed him. For a while they just stood, looking out over the rolling waters, watching the fishing boats bob up and down, the ships farther out seemingly sitting still.

  Finally his father spoke. ‘Been able to navigate the open ocean, one side of the world to the other and these town dwellers wont let me on a boat. Say I gotta work on the docks.’

  ‘There aint another thing you can do instead?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Damn it, I jus said I got to work on the docks. It’s the deal of that doctor man, that witch doctor.’

  ‘He get us the room and clothes too?’

  His father didnt answer; he just spat over the railing and wiped his lips on his sleeve. ‘They say ships dont need a man like me. Say they got maps instead. Only thing I’m good for is hauling cargo like I’m some type of damn mule.’

  Down on the pier a longshoreman rang a bell and the other dock workers came running. A ship was coming in. The men shoved at one another, trying to get to the end of the dock.

  ‘Look at em,’ his father said. ‘Get paid per piece of cargo they carry. Fight like dogs to work.’ He shook his head. ‘Told me start tomorrow.’

  The bell rang early, before either the boy or his father was awake. On the third clang, the boy roused his father.

  ‘Bells ringin,’ he said.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ his father said and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He pulled on his boots, pair of second-handers that came with his clothes.

  In the early morning, without the sun risen, it was difficult to navigate the streets. Everything led to the docks though and as other longshoremen ran past him, the father picked up his pace. By the time he reached the dock, a dozen men were already there, one of them reeled the boat in and moored it to a piling.

  ‘Got a fair amount a fish,’ one of the men on the boat called.

  The bell on the dock clanged again.

  The father stepped forward, ready to take a piece of cargo, whatever form it might be in.

  ‘You there, new hands,’ a man said. He seized the father by the wrist. ‘Wheres your hooks?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘The hooks you was given. Dont act like you didnt know you was supposed to have the hooks.’

  ‘I forgot em, I guess.’

  Other men shuffled past the father and grabbed their sacks of cargo, piercing the burlap sacks with their hooks and toting them off the dock. A man on a wooden box at the end of the dock shouted and pointed frantically, directing the longshoremen where to carry their goods.

  ‘Here,’ the boss said. He handed the father a set of hooks with yellow handles. ‘Take this off your pay. If you dont give em back to me when youre done, it’ll cost you a week’s wages.’

  For a moment the father stood dumbly, the tools in his hand.

  ‘Go,’ the boss shouted.

  The father turned around and stooped to grab a bag as he’d seen the other men do, but another longshoreman snagged the sack out from under him. He elbowed yet another man and sank his hook into the bag. He pulled and the sack came apart at the seam.

  ‘Damn greenhorn,’ a man on the boat said. ‘Gotta loop the hook through on either side of the sack, keeps the bag from tearin.’

  The father rehooked the sack and slung it up onto his shoulder.

  ‘Salthouse!’ the man on the block shouted. He pointed to the right. The father did as he was told and trod over to a grey stone building with a steep roof. A man stood outside, directing the organization of the sacks.

  ‘You salthouse?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Sacks torn.’

  ‘Put my hook in wrong.’

  The salthouse man shrugged. ‘Might be, but I gotta charge ya.’

  The father must have started at the statement because the salthouse man immediately gave his justification. ‘When a sacks torn open, I dont know whether I got all my fish. You coulda stole one and hid it so
mewhere. Or you might have just made a mistake. But that mistake could mean you dropped some fish somewhere along the way. The dock manager’ll take care of it.’

  The father wanted to argue, but the other longshoremen were already dropping their second loads and running back to the dock.

  By the time the father ran back to the dock, the first boat was gone and another was tethered to the other side of the dock. The cargo on this ship was larger and required two men to lift the sacks together.

  ‘Still usin my hooks for this load?’ the dock manager said.

  ‘I guess I was planning on it,’ the father said.

  ‘Took so long getting back here, I thought maybe you’d run back to that inn the doctor put you in and got your own hooks.’

  ‘Got held up at the salthouse because my bag was teared.’

  The dock manager smirked and took out a notepad, made a mark on it. ‘Gonna have to charge you for the hooks a second time.’

  ‘Whys that?’

  ‘Two boats, two jobs, two times you forgot your tools.’

  ‘Grab this here end,’ a longshoreman said. He pointed at the father. He did as he was told and the men lifted the sack. ‘You go backward,’ the old longshoreman said. ‘Got bad knees.’

  Walking backward with the cargo was cumbersome, forcing the father to waddle.

  ‘Gonna have to pick up the pace there,’ the old longshoreman said. ‘Wont make enough money by dawdling along.’

  ‘Smokehouse!’ the director yelled.

  The old longshoreman cursed under his breath, then looked at the father. ‘That whore’s sons gonna make us traipse all across the town to the smokery.’ Despite having bad knees, the old man doubled their speed, nearly knocking the father down. ‘Need another load after this and I’m a-set.’

  ‘Set for what?’ the father asked. He only responded with a question to get the old man talking in an effort to slow him down.

  ‘Youre livin at the inn, aint ya?’

  The father nodded.

  ‘You mean you aint gotten in that pussy up there?’