by Zack Parsons
It stopped, snorted, tried to start toward him again, and fell onto its side. Father laughed very hard at this and even harder when Gideon realized his missed shot at the Indian had punctured the water skin.
“You’ve managed to kill yourself all over again,” said Father.
Gideon saved what he could from the water skin—not much at all—and left the dead horse and Indian lying where they had fallen. In the panniers he discovered beads and bones and Mexican paper and a skin full of tiswin that he drank, burning and awful, though he knew it would soon worsen his thirst.
He clutched in his arm the red valise of Father’s attorney, and he carried the Indian’s flintlock and tobacco for a time, thinking of trading or protecting himself from animals, but as he grew weaker, these fell from his grasp. His hold on the valise tightened.
Night came, and the bright gibbous moon kept a deep shade of blue overhead. The sand seemed to glow beneath that cloudless sky. It appeared like snow, and, with the cold, it was easy for Gideon to imagine himself on the Christmas heath of Chatholm. He shivered out of cold and weakness, teeth clicking painfully, and thirst was his constant concern.
He was followed into the night, pursued by a cautious band of coyotes. Each time he looked back, he would catch only a glimpse as they disappeared behind the last dune he’d crossed. When the wind fell silent, he could hear them sniff and dig at his trail of blood or hear the soft pad of their feet on the sand. They snarled and yipped with excitement when he descended the face of a dune or slipped and fell in the spilling desert. He could sense them closing in and rose before they thought him too weak to continue and decided the moment had come to attack.
Father’s voice mocked him, though he never saw the apparition after its strangulation at the creek. Delirious, dying, Gideon tumbled down a dune’s slack, accompanied all the way by Father’s laugh. The mountains seemed near enough to be touched. The San Andres. The black stones towered behind the desert, radiating heat, yet he felt, at last, he could not rise again.
Gideon laughed at himself. Laughed at his fate. The valise fell open, and papers began to spill out. The wind whipped papers into the air and swept the contents of the valise away down the rippling slack until only a single bound folio remained.
He watched the coyotes mount the dune above him, one next to the other, a formation ready to charge down after him. They growled and licked their jaws at the prospect of his meat. The largest started down the dune. Its eyes burned with the reflected moonlight, and Gideon could see strings of drool slipping from its open mouth.
The coyote stopped, flattened its ears, lowered the wedge of its head to the sand, and growled.
“Come on,” Gideon said. “Come and have your meal.”
He could nearly feel the teeth at his throat. The coyotes did not obey him. They were backing away, snarling and retreating back up the dune. Some near the top turned and ran, trailing piss, or slunk off with heads low and tails tucked beneath their bodies.
Gideon had enough sense left to realize these hungry animals were not afraid of him. He rolled his head and looked to the opposite dune.
The lone dog stood limned by the light of the moon. It was of the mongrel, prick-eared sort kept by Indians. Its fur was completely white, nearly incandescent, as if lit from behind, whiter even than the gypsum sand, and its eyes were pale blue gems. Gideon had never seen a dog like it, and, in his way, he understood the fear of the coyotes. It was not a fear of violence but of something out of place, as if something had stepped from a dream and into the world.
The dog stared at him, not happily in the way of a pet, yet not in challenge; it was appraising him. It stared for a long time and then disappeared silently back over the dune.
Gideon found the strength to rise, scooped the remaining folio back into the valise, and, though he was afraid, felt compelled, by the strangeness of the dog and by his hopeless situation, to follow it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The prisoners not too badly injured were disarmed by Sheriff Groves and his men and put to work clearing debris under guard. The prisoners too wounded to work lay in their bindings and moaned and cursed the wasps that crawled upon their faces.
Sheriff Groves and his posse saved what men and women they could from the tangled ruin of the train. Many lay trapped by tons of debris and it was not possible to dislodge the crumpled cars for fear of further injuring those beneath.
As night approached they lit fires and burned sagebrush to drive away the wasps. A search revealed pieces of crates used for mining charges and the iron bands from black-powder kegs. Some horses used by the ambushers were recovered and the injured passengers were put onto sledges behind them.
Turk discovered a fancy rifle on the banks of Green Creek and brought it for Sheriff Groves to examine. It was silver-plated and filigreed and mounted with a glass telescope. Sheriff Groves turned it over in his hands.
It was an exquisite marksman’s weapon of foreign manufacture and designed for exotic, high-caliber cartridges. Few men in the Territories could afford such weapons. There could be little doubt it belonged to the master of the attack and based upon the position where it was discovered, this man was also surely the one Sheriff Groves had wounded.
Soon after dark the fire-lit camp was joined by a full company of artillery and wagon under Colonel Mildenhall. Guns were unlimbered and revetments dug as the gunners deployed in a perimeter around the derailed train. The colonel declared entrenched defenses necessary to repel Indian attacks, though none was forthcoming.
“Hardly favorable gunnery positions,” he said to Sheriff Groves. “Had I known the extent of this disaster, I might have brought the entire battalion down from Red Stem.”
“Have you brought a doctor?”
“Yes.” Colonel Mildenhall pointed out an officer in conversation with several men of the wagon team. “That is Lieutenant Gutteridge. He is Fort Trumbull’s surgeon and a fine fellow. Show him to the wounded, and I am certain he can take over from there.”
Sheriff Groves held his hat in hands chapped and blistered by a day of constant labor. “We done what we could for those trapped. With the ox you might be able to move some of the wreck.”
Colonel Mildenhall was distracted and conferred with an adjutant for several seconds before answering. “Oh, yes, of course. My engineers are already inspecting the train. We might have been here sooner had we been better forewarned.”
Down in the creek the terrible jumble of wreckage was caught in the living light of the engineers’ torches, and Sheriff Groves recalled a tiny girl he had lifted from beneath a wheel of the train. She lived only a short time after her rescue and never spoke, though she was wide-eyed and awake.
He could not stand to hold her in his arms and so he discovered a reason to be busy and passed her tiny body to Felix Arguello. The deputy was had sat talking to his dead brother’s corpse as if it was still alive took the child in his arms and held her like a doll. Much later and after an exhausting effort with the axes Sheriff Groves saw the girl dangling in Felix Arguello’s arms as dead as a drowned cat. The deputy was singing a Spanish lullaby to her.
“We’ll use axes here,” said an officer of the engineers. “Tie the chain on—no, not there, on the main beam. The floor is already buckled.”
The chief engineer shortly came over to them and thanked Sheriff Groves and his men for their efforts. He turned back to his work and only paused to scrape a bit of creek mud from the top of his boot. “You get yourself some food and water,” he said.
“I thought to leave,” said Sheriff Groves. “My wife is giving birth.”
The engineer returned to them and placed both hands on Sheriff Groves’ shoulders and looked him in the eye almost fondly. “My goodness, man. What a day for you to be out here. Go on back to your wife. The Army has this matter under control.”
Gideon held on desperately to the valise, though he long ago forgot what it might contain. The world he perceived belonged mostly to the cold racking his body
and the silent white dog that padded ahead of him through the desert. It loped on, sure of its bearings, and he followed it beyond the limits of endurance. The dog never allowed him close enough to touch. It took each dune ahead and turned back and watched him as he struggled on, the sand sucking at his boots.
When he fell, the dog stopped and sniffed at him. Each time he felt sure he could go on no longer, he found some last reserve of strength and, summoning it with a groan, rose to his feet and continued after the white dog.
“Where are you taking me?”
The dog did not answer but cocked its ears and looked back as if Gideon might have barked or made some other equally unexpected sound.
“Home to the family? A walking ration for your pups, eh? My meat is all stringy. Marinated in whiskey.”
Short, limestone hills rose from the dunes ahead, shaped so perfectly that they seemed designed, though the tops of some were pitted or flattened as if struck by a hammer. Beyond these hills, and the last white dunes, lay the stark face of the San Andres range, very close now.
Gideon stopped. These black mountains did not belong to the San Andres at all. During his wandering he must have crossed some impossible distance, or was conveyed by some unknown means, for the black granite rocks could only belong to the Oscura range, which lay many miles farther north than the San Andres.
This range was considered dangerous and uninhabitable, avoided by travelers and even retreating Indian raiding parties. The Oscuras lay well north of the Red Lines and closer to the Jornada del Muerto. Though he had never been to the Oscuras, he was aware of underground rivers near them, had seen them marked on maps, and knew they were said to emerge on the surface through ancient basalt channels. The water would be salted, likely barely potable, but in his state he would drink dry the sea.
“Take me to the water,” he told the dog, and he gestured with his hand.
The dog trotted on, leading him among the conical hills scattered lightly with brush and trees. In the branches of one of these sat a horned owl, and it only made sense that its feathers were white and its eyes were blue, because it, like the dog, surely sprang from Gideon’s imagination. But when he blinked, it was only a normal owl, and the dog was still white.
The sands quit with little prelude, and Gideon continued to follow the dog until the hills grew and became jagged enough to resemble the dark mountains. As they approached the black face of the Oscuras, the animals and insects fell silent all at once, as though some invisible line was crossed and on the other side was a vacuum in which nothing could live. Even the wind became silent.
“I am alive,” Gideon said, or maybe only thought, and when he looked up to say something else to the dog, the white hound had disappeared.
Gideon approached the black granite, felt the stone’s warmth with his fingertips. He wondered how the dog might have passed through solid rock. A ghost? Some Indian spirit? No, no, probably a figment of his dying brain. Of course. A biological phantasm. Deprived of oxygen, a man might dream an eternity even as he suffocated. Deprived of blood, which Gideon knew from lecture to convey that vital oxygen, the brain could surely conjure a white dog where none existed.
No. The dog’s head emerged from the rock some ways distant, and the dog gazed at him expectantly before disappearing once more. Gideon stumbled after the dog and found, almost by touch, the entrance to a cave. No, not a cave; he could see moonlight in the depths. He pursued the dog into the mountain and discovered a winding, narrow canyon. He followed the padding sound of the dog’s feet on the dusty rocks, though this sound and the sound of his own steps echoed to confusion in the confines of the canyon.
The mountain rose all around as towering, forbidding walls of black rock. The immediate sides of the canyon were smooth and curving, shaped by countless centuries of wind, though it was deathly still and difficult to imagine any wind at all. It was so quiet, he felt the mute grandeur of a cathedral’s interior or the great hall of a palace. This was a chamber for receiving visitors, God’s own construction to impress His majesty upon emissaries to his realm.
The canyon broadened gradually, and Gideon glimpsed a wider valley, set with terraces hewn from the stone. Ahead, the dog climbed one of these terraces, and as Gideon rounded the final curve in the canyon, he emerged into that valley, the moon bright overhead. Arrayed along the face of the canyon’s wall, constructed atop the carved terraces, sat an entire silent pueblo built of crude, block buildings and linked by the timber bones of ladders.
This Indian city was dark and in a state of ruin. It seemed deader even than the white sand desert. The dog disappeared into the terraced jumble of houses. Gideon did not need the dog. He could smell the water now. Somewhere in those ruins. He had to have a drink. No other thought compelled him. Not even wonder at the discovery of some ancient, sad city built by extinct hands.
Gideon felt very calm. He began to climb up the terrace where the dog had disappeared and thought that after having a drink it might be nice to finally lie down and die.
Annie gasped and sat up in the bed. Nel screamed with fright, and before Annie could speak, the midwife hurried out of the room exclaiming, “She is alive!”
It was night. The sound of the rain was gone, and it was very cold. Annie’s body was damp, and the sheet clung to her as snugly as meat casing but offered no warmth. She tried to turn, found she could not, but was able to get her shaking elbows behind herself and sit upright in the bed.
The baby was still inside her, moving, alive, though only barely. Nel came into the room with tear-wet eyes and seemed unable to come any closer.
“Please,” Annie said, and her voice was only a whisper. “Please, Nel. Come here.”
“It will be okay,” said Nel.
The midwife sat in the chair beside the bed and overcame her fear and held Annie in her arms. Nel stroked Annie’s head and seemed to be trying to calm her once more, but Annie knew there was little time.
The doctor entered the room, carrying a tray of iodine bottles and knives and metal saws. Butcher’s tools.
“Nel,” said Annie. “Listen to me. I am dead, died, I know. Listen. Listen. Where is Warren?”
Nel looked to the doctor, and the doctor shook his head.
“Not here,” said Nel. “But soon ...”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Annie. “Tell Warren ... would like my daughter named after my mother. Claire.” Annie grabbed at Nel’s sleeve and looked up into the midwife’s watering eyes. Annie could feel the bed falling away, the ceiling growing higher and higher.
“There is ... a box, ‘neath the bed. Hurt him ... you ...”
“It’s okay. Warren will take care of it,” Nel said.
Desperation.
“No ... no ... you ...”
Annie slumped and said nothing else. She came to know only the narrowing tunnel that winnowed the memories until there remained only the incandescent thought of those she loved, alive and dead and existing forever in one moment. When she found them, her body slipped away from her. It lay as limp as a doll in Nel’s arms, persisting in myriad tiny ways of biology that would soon fade and never again form the sum of Annabelle Groves.
The men who rode beside Sheriff Groves were sapped of all vitality by their ordeal and slumped in their saddles and fought to remain awake. Felix Arguello rode with his dead brother lain across the back of his horse and wrapped up in blankets that were stained by his blood. The old lawman Ben Reed was pierced through his side by an Apache lance and refused treatment to his wound. He drank apple whiskey until he fell into a stupor and lay moaning in his saddle with the stump of the Indian lance still in his guts.
Sheriff Groves rode ahead, and he sat high in his saddle and kept his back as straight as a flagpole. He rolled his spurs to motivate his horse, and when the men lagged behind, he stood in the stirrups and hollered back to Turk.
The Chinese camps at the base of Red Stem were lit up by candles and lanterns and fed nocturnally upon the sordid economy of miners and foundry w
orkers come down from the mountain to be pillaged of their pay. As Sheriff Groves and his men approached, they were met by riders from the Chinese camp carrying guns and torches.
The outlaw sheriff Artemus Wick sat the back of a gaunt mare, and his face was lit by the glowing cheroot caught in the corner of his thin-lipped mouth. He was lanky and narrow-faced ugly and smiled with black teeth. He held Sheriff Groves and his men up with questions about what had happened and about why the Army was moved south, and he made hollow offers to help.
There were more than a dozen Chinamen with him, and they rode mules and ponies and held torches and shotguns and did not banter or express any sympathy or intent other than the cold menace of their guns. The threat was casual: parley or violence. Not wanting more blood, Sheriff Groves indulged the outlaw.
He told Wick to mind his own business and collect his pay from Desmond Pearce, and Artemus Wick spit tobacco and told him back that no train would have been robbed on his watch. Sheriff Groves had a mind to gun Artemus Wick from his saddle. Turk intervened and told Wick there was a need to hurry and that such conversations could be continued later.
“Will be,” said Wick, and he and his Celestials rode back into the camp.
The cliff pueblo’s paths of white brick were crumbling and precarious. Many of the structures were reduced to yawning, brick-lined holes in the foundational granite, and in these Gideon could see drifts of sand and old bones. He might survive a fall into one such hole, but he would never be able to climb back out. The ladders were tricks—they broke and fell apart at the slightest weight—and so Gideon attempted to follow the footprints left by the dog.
His vision at night was never very keen, and now, barely able to stand, he chose to crawl on hands and knees to steady himself and to even see the tracks left by the white dog. When he lost sight of them, he relied on his sense of smell, for he was able to detect the sweetness of water in the air.