Fandango and Other Stories

by Bryan Karetnyk

  Frowning, Horn bit his lip.

  “Go on—and be done with this!”

  “Well,” Dribb seethed, while his chest heaved like the deck of a ship during a monsoon, “I didn’t know why Esther wasn’t by my side or why she’d been gone so long … I thought she might have needed to go home. Now the ball is in your court, Mr. Horn. If she loves you, let’s take our positions ten paces from one another and let fate decide what it pleases. I came to see you the other day, but you weren’t at home. I searched all the forest paths, the seashore, and all those places where it’s easier to get around. Then I spent two days in your home, but you didn’t come back. Afterward, I took Sigma with me—she’s a fine dog, sir—and all it took was a little over four hours for her to lead me here.”

  “What of it?” said Horn resolutely. “Every word of it’s true, Dribb. Esther did indeed come to see me. I won’t lie to you; maybe it’ll help you. She wanted me to marry her. But I don’t love her, and I told her this, just as I’m telling you.”

  The giant buckled over, as though he were being crushed by a roof. His face turned a dirty white. Choked with anger and grief, he threw himself awkwardly on the ground and, rocking there, gritted his teeth.

  “You weren’t thinking of me,” he cried, “when you were stealing the girl away. And woe betide you if you’re lying to me!”

  “No, Dribb,” said Horn quietly, with the indifferent smile of a man in possession of himself. “You’re wrong. I wasn’t thinking of you in particular, I’ll grant you that, but I was thinking about you. It occurred to me that it would be nice if this beautiful forest sparkled with shady canals and flowering banks, and if elegant bamboo houses stood on these banks, full of carefree happiness, like a lone cloud drifting in the sky. What’s more, I wanted to populate this forest with swarthy little people, beautiful, like Esther, with doe eyes and limbs that are unsullied by dirty labor. How and on what these people would live, I don’t know. But they’re what I should have liked to see, not some unwieldy torso like yours, Dribb, befouled by the sweat of work and decorated with a button instead of a nose.”

  “Just try saying one more word!” With a menacing look, Dribb marched straight up to Horn. “And I’ll kill you on the spot. I’ll leave you swinging from this rubber tree, you scoundrel!”

  “Oh, enough!” Horn turned pale. He was shaking with rage. The valley and the forest fused for a moment into a single circle of green before his very eyes. “It isn’t a case of you or me, Dribb, there’s only me. I’ll kill you, remember that well. Then it’ll be too late for you to see whether I’m lying.”

  “Ten paces,” Dribb barked in a hoarse voice.

  Horn turned and counted out ten, holding a finger on the trigger. A little patch of grass separated them. Their eyes were drawn to one another. Horn jerked up his rifle.

  “No commands,” he said. “Shoot at will.”

  As the word “will” ended, he quickly turned his side towards Dribb, and just in time, for Dribb had pulled the trigger. The bullet grazed Horn’s chest and struck a tree.

  Keeping his nerve, he took aim at the middle of the farmer’s hairy chest and fired without hesitating. A new cartridge had jammed in Dribb’s magazine on its way to the barrel. Dribb staggered back, opened his mouth and fell on his side, without taking his round, vacant eyes off Horn.

  Horn walked up to the wounded man. Dribb was wheezing slowly and heavily, while his enormous body twitched as it lay awkwardly on the ground. His eyes were closed. Horn trembled as he walked away; the sight of the dying man was as unpleasant as any act of destruction. The horse, which had run off a little to the side, had started neighing in alarm. Horn looked at the horse, then at the dog whining beside Dribb, and walked off, loading a fresh cartridge as he went. His thoughts leaped; suddenly he felt profound fatigue and weakness. The flesh on his chest, grazed by Dribb’s bullet, was swollen, oozing with thick blood that trickled in burning drops down his stomach. Squatting down, he tore his shirt into several broad strips, and, having fashioned a bandage from them, tightly bound his ribs. The dressing quickly soaked through and turned red, but there was nothing more to be done.

  While Horn was busying himself, Dribb, who had been lying motionless with a bullet hole through his chest, opened his eyes and spat out a thick wad of blood. The approach of death was bringing him to despair. He stirred himself; his body moved like a sack, replete with sharp pain and weakness. Dribb began crawling toward his horse, groaning as he picked his way through the wet grass, like a puppy that has lost its box. The horse was standing still with its head turned. The nine-yard journey seemed to Dribb to last a thousand years. Choking on blood, he crawled toward the stirrup.

  Spinning around and jumping, Sigma watched the man’s efforts as he tried to get into the saddle, having lost half his blood. He fell five times, but on the sixth attempt he succeeded, yet because of the incredible strain, the forest and sky were dancing before his eyes quicker than flies on carrion. As he sat there with his arms around the horse’s neck, one of his legs slipped out of the stirrup, though he did not attempt to put it back in its place. The horse, with a shake of its mane, set off at a trot.

  Hearing the clatter of hooves, Horn rushed headlong to the spot where Dribb had fallen. A bloody trail led toward the forest—red on green, like liquid, scattered corals.

  “Too late,” said Horn, paling from this unexpected revelation.

  Gripped by alarm, he entered the forest and headed in the direction of the lake as quickly as he could. The golden vistas had disappeared and an even twilight shadow was cast over the tree trunks and the earth. His chest ached as if it had been stabbed. Almost running, hurriedly jumping over trunks that had been felled by a storm, Horn pressed on and saw Dribb’s body, which had fallen from a horse ridden almost to the point of death, surrounded by a crowd of colonists.

  “If that corpse finds the strength to utter just one word, I’ll have to answer to them all,” thought Horn.

  He was already running, gasping from nervous tension. The forest, like a crowd of impotent friends, parted thoughtfully before him, revealing shady depressions, filled with the noise of blood and fanciful green waves.

  IX.

  The door, locked from inside, shuddered from the impatient blows but held fast. Horn quickly shifted his gaze from the undefended window to the door and back again, externally calm but filled with mute frenzy and alarm. This was one of those moments when life stumbles in the darkness over an abyss.

  He found himself in the midst of a crowd that had dismounted in order to spare the horses. The beasts were neighing nearby, anxiously snorting in anticipation of the impending battle. The ground, which had been dug up in the middle of the floor, gaped with a small pit, along the edges of which lay dirty bundles and homemade leather purses, swollen with the fine gold that filled them. Dull, wrapped in damp skins still smelling of dried meat, the gold was as unattractive as a live red lump in the arms of a midwife who was yawning from a sleepless night. But there was enough of it that a man of average strength, having loaded all the little purses and bundles onto his back, could not walk even one hundred paces.

  Horn thought of the gold as much as he thought of himself, though he was penned in by four walls. Everything depended on how events played out. He almost ached at the idea that the accidental trajectory of a bullet could level him with the unexpected gift of fate lying at his feet.

  Fresh blows from the butt of a rifle drummed on the door so frequently and weightily that Horn automatically reached out his hand, expecting it to cave in. A voice said:

  “If you can’t appreciate civility, we’ll have to think of something else. What would you say, for instance, if—”

  “Nothing,” Horn interrupted, without raising his voice, because the thin walls let the words out distinctly. “Even if there were a thousand of you, you could kill only one man. Whereas I can kill many.”

  A gunshot rang out, and simultaneously a bullet pierced through the door and struck the upper par
t of the window. Horn changed position.

  “Right,” he said, “I’m not going to talk to you, because you’ll be able to aim for the sound and shoot at my vocal cords. So far you’ve been missing by only four feet or so.”

  He turned to the window and discharged his rifle into a head that appeared there, before loading a new cartridge.

  “Don’t you think,” the same voice said, emphasizing certain words with the butt of a rifle, “that death under the open sky would be better than dying in a mousetrap?”

  “Dribb’s dead,” said Horn. “Nothing can bring him back. He was hot-tempered and conceited; I had to cool the fellow down. I’m the obliging sort until I myself am threatened with death. Now he’s dead, so what’s to be done about it?! The dog Sigma is more to blame than I: it’s a dangerous thing having such a keen sense of smell.”

  A wild roar and the crack of boards pierced by new bullets stopped him.

  “What perseverance!” said Horn. The chill exhilaration of despair pushed him to make caustic jokes. “Won’t you give it a rest? One would need the patience of a saint to listen to your incoherent threats.”

  Talk continued outside. Hushed exclamations and footfalls would die away and then begin to circle around the house again, closer then farther away, closer then farther away, first in one and then in all directions. A pale rectangle of the moon’s glassy dust fell by the window; there was a persistent crackling of reeds, as if a great beast were settling down to sleep but could not get comfortable. Horn was losing sensation in his body, which was trembling from this excess of excitement; now all ears, he mechanically turned his head in every direction, the rifle’s hammer cocked, and each second remembering the revolver weighing his pocket down.

  A sudden burst of shots made Horn’s hands tremble and his ears ring. Myriad little wood chips, knocked out by the bullets, hit his face and neck, scratching his skin in places.

  After a moment’s silence a voice behind the door dryly inquired:

  “Are you alive?”

  Horn discharged both barrels, aiming for the voice. Behind the door, which shuddered from the impact of a bullet, something soft thudded.

  “I am,” he said, cracking the hot bolt. “And how are you getting on?”

  In response came cursing and an explosive new round of shots. Around the corner, another voice shouted haltingly:

  “Do you like wasting bullets?”

  “I do it for fun,” said Horn, dispatching another round.

  The noise grew.

  “Hey, you!” someone shouted. “I swear by your liver, which I’ll see today with my own eyes, it’s useless to resist. We’ll just hang you; it’s nothing to be afraid of—much better than being burnt alive! Think on this!”

  These words would have sounded perfectly good-natured were it not for the deathly silent pauses that punctuated each phrase. Horn grinned with loathing in his soul; the company that had assembled to roast him was provoking in him a persistent desire to crush the heads of his attackers one by one. He was not afraid; his loneliness in the midst of these talking walls, under this roof, was much too bleak and too much like a dream for him to feel any fear.

  “You don’t recognize me,” continued the halting voice. “Dribb’s the name. I haven’t even seen your face; you’re too proud to find yourself under another man’s roof. And back then, in the bay, it was too dark. But patience has its limits.”

  “A pity that it’s you,” said Horn dryly. “You oughtn’t to have come, out of a sense of impartiality. What did your son say as he fell from his horse?”

  “As he fell from his horse? You weren’t there for that, I hope. He said: ‘Ho—’ and choked. That’s what he said, and you shall answer to me for this half a word.”

  “You should treat life with a philosophical composure,” said Horn mockingly. “I’m not responsible for the actions of young whelps. I should have aimed for his forehead, then he would have died in the firm certainty that I’d been killed by his first shot. Isn’t Guppy here?”

  “I am,” a husky voice called out. It sounded farther away than the spot where Horn imagined Dribb to be.

  “Guppy,” said Horn after a pause, “you should go and get drunk on the sacrificial blood of your pigs!”

  His cheeks twitched with nervous laughter. The colonist’s shrill profanities lodged in his ears with a piercing screech. He went on, as if trying to reason with himself:

  “Guppy is a good man.”

  An unexpected, melancholy joy straightened the hunter’s back; he already regretted it, for this joy extended two hands, giving with one and taking away with the other. But there was no way out. A grotesque death troubled him to the depths of his soul, he had decided.

  “Wait!” cried Horn. “Just a minute!” Quickly, with several blows of an axe he hacked out the upper part of a board in the very top corner of the door and jumped back, fearing a shot. But the sound of iron cutting into the door, it seemed, had somewhat quelled the attackers—as though it were a man peacefully chopping wood. In the jagged hole a piece of misty sky loomed black.

  “Guppy,” said Horn, catching his breath and pricking up his ears. “Guppy, come closer, from whichever side you like. Upon my honor, I won’t shoot. I need to tell you something.”

  A man stationed by the window emerged and, hurriedly taking aim, fired into the darkness of the room. Horn recoiled as the bullet scorched his cheek. Gripped by the searing rage of one being hunted, Horn remained silent for several seconds, aiming the muzzle toward the window with everything inside him shaking, like a factory in full swing—all because of his anger and fury.

  Recollecting himself, he thought that Guppy might already have come close enough. Then, taking a pouch filled with gold dust weighing two or three pounds, he flung it through the hole in the door.

  “This is for you,” Horn said loudly. “And another one … and another.”

  Almost without realizing what he was doing, he tossed the gold into the darkness with a feverish rapidity, listening vacantly to the dull thud of the little bags falling rhythmically on the other side of the door. Tears choked him. The little blue river flowed innocently before his eyes.

  Rapid, confused conversation erupted outside, individual voices sounded now rushing, now muffled, like a somnolent babbling. Horn looked out of the window and listened.

  “Hang on, Guppy!”

  “What do you want?”

  “Put it down!”

  “Leave it!”

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “What, you too? Damn and blast!”

  “What’s it got to do with you?”

  “Where did he get it all?”

  “There’s so much!”

  “I’ll tear your hands off!”

  “For one thing, you’re all fools!”

  The distinctive sound of a slap cut through Horn’s tension. For a moment, the sound abated before bursting forth again with tenfold strength. Footsteps, hurried exclamations, profanities, Dribb’s wrathful cry, and the heavy breathing of people struggling blended, each drowning the other out, and turned into a howling roar. Almost frightened, not quite trusting himself, Horn wheezed, resting his head against the door. He sensed a tussle turning into a brawl, the sudden onset of avarice that in the imagination amplified what was there to grandiose proportions. He also sensed a sharp shift in mood.

  A long, sonorous cry escaped the general fray. And suddenly a shot rang out, after which it seemed to Horn that somewhere off to the side of his home, a dense crowd was thrashing around in some enormous quadrille without lights or music. One after the other, he knocked out the bolts securing the door, quietly opened it, and at once all thought vanished, leaving only the instinctive, unconscious semireflexes of a cornered animal.

  The tumult was coming from Horn’s right, just around the corner. There was no one to be seen, since they were busily finishing their counting. It was unlikely that they would rush to burn down the house in a bid to find there even more of what Horn had
tossed out. Cruel and impatient, like children, they preferred what they could already see to what they could not. Horn exited through the door.

  The shadows cast by the moon looked like strips of black velvet on grass awash with milk. The still air smoldered with a thick light, like chalk dust. The darkness trapped on the edge of the forest dappled it with dark-green cutouts.

  Horn stood there for a moment, listening to the beating heart of the night, silent, like a melody being performed in the mind, and suddenly, hunching over, he made a break for the forest. The air whistled in his ears, his body suddenly began to ache all at once from the quick movements, everything lost its stillness and rushed headlong beside him, gasping, deafeningly loud, like water in the ears of a man who has dived from a great height. Even the horse tied by the edge of the forest seemed to hurry to him, as it stood there side-on, lazily kicking its legs. He gripped its mane; the saddle slowly rocked beneath him. Having hastily cut the tether with a knife almost the moment he discovered it, Horn discharged all six bullets from the revolver into three or four of the nearest horses, which bolted at the sound of the shots. He set off at a gallop, while the darkness, like an invisible deluge of air, rushed to meet him.

  Somewhere high up above his head, moving from a falsetto to an alto, a stray bullet sang out before fading, describing an arc and harmlessly falling in the sand beside a harassed ant, which was in the process of dragging a twig that was somehow very essential to it.

  Horn rode, without stopping, for a distance of around six or seven miles. He cut across the plain, descended into the scrub of the marine plateau, and came out onto the road leading to the town.

  At that point he paused, saving the animal’s strength for a likely chase. To the left, from the depths of the nocturnal abyss, coming from the direction of the lake, he heard an indeterminate thudding, as though someone were drumming his fingers on a table, losing the rhythm and then picking it up again. Horn pricked up his ears, shuddered, and struck the horse with great force.