by Tom Lin
Proteus shrank from the ringmaster’s gaze. All were silent awhile. “Sir,” Proteus stammered at last, “I was just wondering, is all.” He opened his mouth to speak but was overcome by a fit of coughing that forced him to his haunches. The pagan hacked away and thumped his chest and breathed heavily. He spat on the ground between his feet and abruptly stooped to examine where it had fallen. He looked back up at the ringmaster. “There’s blood,” he said. He touched a finger to where he’d spat and held it up to the firelight. “You’re coughing blood.”
“From where I struck you last night, no doubt,” the ringmaster said.
“It ain’t that,” Proteus said. “It’s you.”
“Then it’s nothing at all.”
“It’s nothing at all,” Hazel repeated, her voice clear. “Come now,” she said, rising to her feet. She reached down and pulled Hunter up with her. “It’s late.” She shot the ringmaster a glance and left. Ming watched her go.
“See you folks in the morning,” the ringmaster said curtly. He tipped his hat and left.
One by one the others left. Only Ming and the pagan remained by the fire.
Proteus stretched out on his side and faced the flames, his breathing slow and deep, one hand pressed to his chest. He stared at Ming. “You killed him,” he whispered.
“It ain’t so,” Ming said.
Proteus rolled over onto his back and his figure lengthened until he was returned to his original pagan form. He sat up and took a few cautious breaths, his tattooed chest rising and falling. He ran his tongue over his teeth, sucked and spat again. No blood. He glared at Ming a long time but said nothing. At last he lay back down on the hardpack dirt and went to sleep.
41
Before the sun had risen they were already on the move, the lush marshes of Lovelock receding in the distance behind them. Over the flat ground in the cool predawn they made good time, ten miles in only a few hours. Then the heat began to drain them, man and beast alike. By noon when they stopped for lunch the horses were moving scarcely faster than a man could walk. The party ate salt beef so dry and brittle it splintered to chips in their mouths and biscuits that were inedible unless they were softened in water. When they were finished they set off again, the draft horses pulling the stagecoach at a crawl. It was endlessly bright. Ming rode ahead of the party and Hazel walked alongside his horse.
“He’s dying, ain’t he,” Hazel said, her voice flat and distant.
Ming squinted down at her from the saddle, shaded his eyes with the brim of his hat. She was staring straight ahead. He adjusted his hat and turned his eyes back to the horizon. He did not speak.
“Ain’t he,” Hazel said.
She was looking at him now and Ming met her insistent gaze.
“Aye,” Ming said. “Consumption.”
“I heard him coughing back in Winnemucca,” she said. “Same cough from back in Omaha.”
“The prophet says he’ll die in five days,” Ming said. “At Pyramid Lake.”
His horse kicked up a cloud of dust as they moved and through this pall the stagecoach passed and became gilded with a fine coat of dust. The ringmaster sat with his feet dangling from the running boards, his hat balanced on his knee, squinting into the sun. He noticed Ming watching him and flashed a grin. Ming nodded and turned back to the trail.
“And what’ll we do after that?” Hazel said. “You’ll stay with us after he dies, won’t you?”
“I’ll take you on through to Reno,” Ming said, “as promised.”
“And then?”
Ming looked down at Hazel, her shadow short under the midday sun. “Then Californie.”
“You reckon you’ll get her back?”
“I spose I ain’t thought on that till just now.” He fingered the reins, running his thumb over the rawhide. He related what Dixon had told him—that Ada was married to Gideon Porter, even had a kid with him now. He gazed out over the horizon. “I ain’t so sure anymore she’d come with me if I was aimin to take her back. But maybe Dixon was lyin.” He twisted round in his saddle to look at the prophet riding far behind, beside the stagecoach. Already he knew it was no use asking the old man if Dixon had been telling the truth. He turned back to face the western horizon. “Ain’t no tellin until I’m there with her, I spose.”
“Christ,” Hazel said. “I’m sorry, Ming.”
Silence followed, interrupted only by hoofbeats on dust.
“Ming,” Hazel said quietly. She squinted up at him in the sunlight. “Stay in Reno with me.”
“Can’t.” His voice was firm.
“Why not?”
“I owe it to Ada. She’s still my wife, no matter what some crooked judge says.” He peered down at Hazel. “Maybe she ain’t the same no more, and maybe Dixon warn’t lyin and she really ain’t never loved me. But I gotta try. I owe her that much.”
“Do you still love her?” Hazel asked.
“Ain’t you asked me that before?” Ming said.
“Aye. But I reckoned you might’ve changed your mind now, knowin bout Gideon and the kid.”
“Hell,” he said, “what does that matter to anyone?”
They moved along the dry flats and passed into low foothills ground smooth and gentle by a thousand years of wind. On the horizon loomed the hardening forms of blue-hued mountains and clouds as the sun hammered down on them.
As dusk drew near they stopped and had supper, built a fire from the ribs of chollas that threw heat and light and coiling snakes of smoke. The gypsum paths of ancient rivers glinted in the light of a low moon. Proteus stared into the fire and watched the stagehands as they worked around it. They were spent from the day. No one said much. When deep night fell the prophet rose and cast his opalescent gaze westward and with a strange smile upon his face he said that they were at last coming to the boundary lands.
42
In the early morning the next day they snaked up into the Trinity Range, making good time. Ming was riding solo ahead of the party when a voice rang out from behind him. It was the ringmaster. Ming turned in his saddle and gave the reins a quick tug. He waited as the ringmaster approached, lightly gripping his cane.
Under his hat the man’s face was featureless in shadow against the midday brightness. He caught his breath and gave a few halfhearted coughs, each one prefaced by a deep, wheezing gasp. At last he cleared his throat and wiped errant flecks of mucus from his face with the back of his hand. “Wanted to speak to you,” he said, “away from the others.” He coughed again and spat. He ground the blood into the sand with the heel of his boot and motioned for Ming to start moving again and he obliged.
Ming did not speak. He kept his eyes level and clear. The landscape around them was shifting, moving. Plates of earth wrenching out of the soil, strata of rock glazing under the eternal sun. The trail had become twisting and narrow.
The ringmaster rummaged in his pack for his flask and tipped back a few dregs of whiskey. He cleared his throat and offered it up to Ming, who shook his head. “Believe it or not,” the ringmaster said, “it helps with the consumption. Doctor’s orders.” He chuckled and put the flask away, then cast a furtive glance behind them, gauging how far the others were. He seemed satisfied, and continued. “Mr. Tsu, after I die—”
“I’ll take them through to Reno,” Ming said. “As promised.”
“Good man,” the ringmaster said. “In spite of your having killed and stolen from every man woman and child who ever came near you, I always reckoned you an honest man.”
“I ain’t never stole from no woman,” Ming said. “Ain’t never stole from no child, neither.”
“Then you’re an even more honest man than I thought,” the ringmaster said. “Hazel tells me you’re striking out to Californie once you get everyone to Reno. For a girl, I take it?”
“Spose so,” Ming said.
They crossed the pass and the trail began to slope downward again. Ming and the ringmaster walked alongside each other, the distant horizon seeming to draw no nearer.<
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“Gomez and Notah can take care of themselves,” the ringmaster said. “Proteus too, if he keeps his temper cool.”
“And Hazel?”
“Ms. Lockewood is more than capable,” the ringmaster replied. “It’s the boy I’m not so sure about. I’ve taken care of him almost four years now, since before he could talk. I suppose he can’t talk now, either, but you get my meaning.” He looked again at the stagecoach behind them, swathed in a dust cloud of its own design.
“He’ll be with Hazel,” Ming said. “He’ll be all right.”
“Ms. Lockewood has taken a liking to you,” the ringmaster said.
“Seems so,” Ming said.
“And you to her.”
“Spose,” Ming allowed.
“Mr. Tsu,” the ringmaster said gravely. “Take care of her. And the boy. See to it that they’re safe.”
Ming gave his word.
The ringmaster regarded him for a while and then offered a slight nod. “Good,” he said, and left it at that.
The sun was coming up harsh over the mountains to the west and now the earth was awash in strange hues of gold and umber. A thin mist rose from the last of the yellow rabbitbrush flowers that still bloomed and for a while they traveled through a corona of fog as the trail leveled out before them. The ringmaster kept pace with Ming. They moved in silence for a few miles.
“I have been alive,” the ringmaster said, his voice strange and distant, “an exceedingly long time, Mr. Tsu.” He tucked his cane under one arm and held his hands out flat in front of him, turning them this way and that, examining the numberless wrinkles and scars incised onto his skin. The morning dew was burning off, the light hardening. The ringmaster frowned and returned his hands to his sides. “An exceedingly long time,” he repeated, though he seemed to be speaking to himself.
“You ain’t been around that long, man,” Ming scoffed. “Fifty? Sixty years?”
The ringmaster smiled. “Eleven,” he said, “this particular time around.”
Ming glanced down at him. “How do you mean?”
“Eleven years, this particular time around,” the ringmaster repeated softly. He reached up and tapped Ming on the knee. “Come down,” he said, “and walk with me a while.”
“What for?”
“I am an old man walking to my death,” the ringmaster said. “Humor me. Come down.”
Ming swung his leg over the saddle and leapt down, his horse still moving under him. As he came down he let the reins run through his hand and when he landed he held them loosely, walking the animal beside him. They walked three abreast now, Ming, the ringmaster, and the horse.
“We are all miracles here,” the ringmaster said.
“I’m aware.”
“Even me.”
“Even you?”
The ringmaster breathed deeply and his lungs rattled with a sound like distant drumfire. “I don’t know why I haven’t told you until now,” the ringmaster said, “but I have lived a hundred thousand lives.” His voice was low. “I will die in four days, yes, but I have died countless times before. Always the same. I wake up in 1858 in a boardinghouse in Omaha with consumption and a thousand dollars in my pack.” He gazed out over the land. “This is the farthest I’ve ever come.” The ringmaster smiled and clapped Ming on the shoulder. “For that I thank you,” he said, and drifted back to join the others.
43
When the dew of the following morning had burned off and the sky whitened to an alabaster blue they stopped for lunch in the broken shade of an ancient sagebrush scoured clean by the unrelenting wind. They were heading south alongside the western flank of the Trinity Range now and under the relentless sun it was far too hot to build a fire. The ringmaster ate hardly anything.
“Sir,” Proteus said. He was in the form of the ringmaster and the lone word brought on a violent fit of coughing. When he had gathered his breath again he spat into the ground and rubbed it out with the heel of his hand. Faint streaks of pink remained. He pointed, first at the spot in the dirt and then at the ringmaster. “Tell me it ain’t true.”
The ringmaster gazed a moment at the drying blood and saliva. “I’m afraid it’s true, old friend.”
“You’re dying,” Notah said. He seemed to be discovering this for the first time.
“About damn time, I reckon,” the ringmaster said.
“He killed you,” Proteus said, and pointed a crooked finger at Ming.
“It isn’t so,” the ringmaster said firmly, and turned to face the prophet. “When will it be?” he asked.
“Sunrise,” the prophet intoned. “In three days.”
They spent the next day moving through a white heat that bleached the landscape to alabaster. A short while after lunch they came across a slow rise in the earth that seemed at first to be an outcropping of stones. Objects of broken lines and curves speckled the horizon. As they drew nearer Ming saw that they were the color of old bone, pale creams and grays: ribs and vertebrae and the caved-in remnants of an enormous skull still bearing its teeth, all of the bones snaking through the hardpack dirt. Ming knelt and wiped the dust from a vertebra, ran his fingernail over the ridges and grooves of the old bone. He tugged at the vertebra buried in the dirt but could not dislodge it. With his rail spike he began to excavate the bone.
“Ribs,” the ringmaster said.
“More than ribs,” Ming said. He levered the vertebra out of the ground with the point of his spike and brushed the loose dirt from its surface as he stood. The bone was heavier than he expected and he tossed it from hand to hand, familiarizing himself with its weight. He gestured with it toward the ground. “There’s a whole skeleton here.”
The line of vertebrae continued from where Ming had been digging, the bones widening as they went up the line and then disappearing for a length underground before emerging a few yards distant replete with an eruption of ribs, mostly broken, of which some still intact rose out of the earth a head taller than any man Ming had ever seen. A cathedral of bones. Ming helped the prophet down from his horse and led him to the center of the ribs. The old man’s feet rocked back and forth on a vertebra in the dust. He placed a withered hand on one of the ribs and closed his eyes.
“Something huge,” Gomez mused. He ran a finger along the arc of a rib, rubbed the dust between his fingers. “What do you reckon it was?”
“An example of a great fish,” the ringmaster said. “The same kind that swallowed up Jonah. You’re a man of God, Gomez, are you not?”
“Aye,” Gomez replied, “but this ain’t like no fish I ever caught.” He wandered over to where the vast skull lay crushed in the dirt and worked a long vicious tooth free. He tossed it into the air and caught it again, held it up to the sunlight and inspected it awhile. When he was satisfied he slipped the tooth into his pocket and patted it.
As they were leaving to continue down toward the southern tip of the Sahwaves the ringmaster asked the prophet what this creature had once been and the old man replied that it was indeed a great fish, as the ringmaster had reckoned, but like no fish that still leapt and swam, as Gomez had observed. The prophet said that it had been a creature of an antediluvian age, that long ago it swam here in a sunlit sea forty fathoms deep. And he said that this land was once somewhere else, that indeed all land had once been somewhere else, that the earth turned and turns in an endless sweep of placelessness. The prophet spoke again of his favored subject, time beyond time, of mountains ground to dust in the blink of an ancient eye, of chasms chiseled through sandstone. Our world, he said, was but a fiendish patchwork of rock and water, seamed under the oceans with fire and rock.
That night Ming dreamed he rode through a world spinning itself to pieces. He dreamed of reins held tight and the vast and sickening lurch of the world beneath him: time beyond time.
By sunset the following day they had traveled nearly half the remaining distance to Pyramid Lake. The moon was high overhead, feathering into reality by gradations of light, growing more solid with each p
assing moment. The trail wound sinusoidal through interlocking spurs before ascending the grade of the mountain to the pass. The horses were slow and sure-footed.
Ming ranged ahead on his own, riding out a hundred yards at a time and halting to listen for sounds of men or beasts. There were none. Only the endless low throb of wind cutting through the peaks. It did not trouble him that the ringmaster would soon be gone. He had seen men go to their deaths believing till the last that they would survive, had seen the faces of men crying out as they tumbled end over end like rail ties down sheer granite slopes.
And he had heard them too. Once in the Sierras a full charge of powder had gone off early and the rock had come sheeting down, moving like water, burying a gang of twenty men. First they screamed, muffled and remote in the rockpack. All through the night the snow fell and in the morning the rockslide was buried under snowdrift, white and blinding and perfectly smooth. And still they heard the feeble moans of the men buried underneath. Those on the outside worked three days to clear the rubble. Shovelfuls of snow and broken rock. Sweat steaming from men’s faces as they labored. The work was quick, though not urgent. They were digging to clear the grade for the rails, not to free the men inside. Ming’s breath—catching on his beard, his shirt collar—was glazed with ice at close of day. It would have taken only a single day but for the storms, those relentless storms, which nightly erased their work. On the third day they shoveled off the last of the slide and found the bodies. Some of the men had been reduced to incoherent smears of blood and bone, stiff as beams, their joints seized up with ice. Others looked as though they had been merely sleeping. The meltwater from the heat of their bodies had clung to their faces and frozen into translucent death masks. None were still alive. Their faces were contorted, dreadful things wearing grotesque expressions of panic and fear.
Ming shuddered. The moon was dead ahead of him and he held his hands up at arm’s length, stacking his fingers on the horizon. Six fingers to the moon. That meant an hour and a half left of moonlight. He wondered whether the horses could see in total darkness.