The New World

by Andrew Motion

  He grasped Anne Marie by the hand, turned smartly on his heel, shut the door behind him, and clumped away along the bare boards; by the time his footsteps melted into the laughter downstairs, we had already begun to change.

  CHAPTER 32

  Our Evening Together

  Our new clothes, which for a while seemed so unnatural to us—so tight, so bright, so peculiar in their ingenuity—made us feel interesting to everyone as soon as we left our lodging; I tucked my satchel inside my shirt and buttoned it up tight. In fact no one paid us the least attention, because everyone was too preoccupied by their own affairs. We were just four more faces among a multitude of strangers, and this soon restored my sense that we were invisible. By the time we had found our way through the backstreets and across the main square, then sat down together to make our celebrations as Joshua wanted, I felt certain that Black Cloud could not possibly harm me.

  I should call the place we had chosen an inn, but it bore so little resemblance to the inn I knew best—the Hispaniola, which had been my home until I met Natty—that some other word would do better. It was a single high-ceilinged room, with a gallery (fed by stairways on all four sides) for additional seats such as you might find in a church, dozens of tables and chairs, candles gleaming, an endless bar, waitresses wearing black dresses and shirts like French maids, and an enormous, sweating, heaving crowd of people whose sole purpose was to consume a tremendous quantity of liquor while producing an equally tremendous din of shouts and whistles and comments and accusations and arguments and secrets and convictions. Not so much an inn, therefore, as a kind of den. Uproarious, outrageous and chaotic—as though everyone present was convinced the world would end tomorrow morning, and tonight was their last chance to enjoy themselves before the catastrophe.

  Joshua, as I have said, was not at all interested in last things. In fact no sooner had he found us a table—beneath a long window overlooking the river—and hailed a waitress, and filled our glasses with whiskey, than he once again toasted the start of our lives, and how we would henceforth share them together. From this I understood him to have decided that our leaving tomorrow was an incredible idea, ridiculous in fact, and hoped to persuade us of this before the evening was done. Wishing us wealth and happiness, he waved his glass in the direction of my satchel—which he knew must be concealed inside my shirt—to show how well he understood its contents would help us achieve our joint ambitions. I glanced away at Natty and she gave me a little nod; in this way we agreed that tonight we would not protest any longer. We would play along with Joshua’s ideas of our partnership, then disappear quietly in the morning.

  For this reason I preferred not to encourage a conversation about our future together, and instead waited for Joshua to finish his cajoling, then spoke of nothing in particular—of the astonishing variety of people who thronged around us; of the great degree of drunkenness; of the tobacco smoke that swirled through everything like a fog; of the habit, apparently common to all Americans, of spitting on the floor whenever possible; of the myriad accents and languages and voices—and, when we were tired of these things, of the view through the long window beside us. This window opened directly onto a wharf that ran along the waterfront and so acted as a landing-stage for every vessel that tied up here, as well as being a temporary store for merchandise: bales of cotton, piles of logs, sacks of rice, and wicker crates in which (whenever the moon swam from behind the clouds that had blown in from the bay) I could see the claws of lobsters and crayfish waving slowly behind their bars.

  I suppose we continued drinking for an hour or more. I also suppose that such a spell of shouting above the hubbub, of rubbing eyes and clearing throats, was long enough to make me pay less careful attention to things than I usually do. Less attention and yet more attention as well. I remember, at any rate, that after a while I became remarkably interested in those meaty claws waving at me in their traps. Very interested too in the men who sometimes strolled along the wharf and stared into our own faces as we stared out at them.

  Especially in two men I saw too late, when they were walking away from me with their heads bowed and their shoulders touching. Or rather floating away from me, not walking. Drifting over the decking as if they were weightless.

  “What is it, Jim?” Natty was sitting with her back to the window and had seen me staring off, but I could not answer her at once; I was not sure.

  I stood up and bent forward, leaning my hands on the table so I could look further out through the window. The two silhouettes had vanished.

  “No one there,” I told her after a minute. “I couldn’t see.”

  Natty leaped up at once, pushing past me so she was no longer blinded by the lights of the taproom. I imagined the difference she must feel, with the breeze whispering through the rigging of the ships, and the river slapping against the struts of the wharf.

  Then Joshua was up as well, resting his hand on her shoulder, on the strip of green between her bare neck and her short sleeve. He knew what we were saying—he had seen Black Cloud off the stern of the Angel; but I thought he might still be full of bluster and say we had no reason to worry. Again he surprised me. Once he had turned Natty round to face the room, and made sure he had my attention as well as hers, he unbuttoned his black topcoat and held it open as carefully as he could manage, so no one else in the room saw what he was showing—a silver pistol tucked into his belt.

  I sat him down as quickly as possible, saying once more that I was mistaken, certainly mistaken; there was no one. “Please,” I went on, looking at Natty now, and waiting for her to sit down as well.

  This time she believed me. With a final glance outside, she sank into her chair, took a big gulp of her drink, smiled—and a moment later we were happy again, toasting our coming success in ships, or trade, or ferry-boats, or running a store, or any of the thousand other opportunities that awaited us in the grand new city. The two shadow-walkers might never have existed.

  By midnight we had drunk enough to believe that all our triumphs would come to us immediately, perhaps even before daybreak. But when we stepped outside, amidst a barrage of goodnights and encouragements from others who dispersed at the same time, with the waitresses saying we were welcome to visit again tomorrow, we felt the collapse that every drinker knows when they are knocked on the head by a blow of cold air. The square before us was a desert of silvery light, with the shadows of balconies and chimneys lying on the stones like iron. Late walkers clattered homeward, their echoes quickly vanishing into the tall sky. A dog barked, and was answered by another far off. A moth thrummed in a lamp. Then the vegetation-smell and the mud-smell and the salt-smell poured over us.

  I suppose it was the shock of this change—which in truth felt like another kind of intoxication—that persuaded me we should not go back to our hotel at once, but rather stroll to the river and watch it run past. Why the others agreed so readily I can only guess: perhaps Joshua and Anne Marie wanted to make a sentimental connection with their new home, just as Natty and I wanted to begin our farewell to it. In any event, when I led the way round the side of the inn and climbed down a few steps onto the wharf, the others followed me without question.

  Although the surface of the wharf was only a few feet lower than the solid ground, I might as well have stepped into a different world. Here, with the shallows gleaming between cracks in the decking, and the suck and push of the water much louder, I had escaped the boundaries of the town—escaped the whole of America in fact, and everyone in it. If I stared upriver I saw the vast mirror-sweep of the current bending out of sight, and knew that beyond its margin of trees lay the wilderness I loved. If I turned to my right I saw the same universe of water vanishing between mud-islands toward the sea, which I imagined marking the horizon with a line of silver foam.

  Two kinds of nothing, and myself at the center. Two kinds of emptiness, but also two kinds of fellowship. For a moment I had my wish. I felt planted deeply in the world, yet removed from it. I was safe. I was invincib
le.

  CHAPTER 33

  What Is Mine

  I finished my star-gazing and turned back to my friends, expecting I would say something about the warmth of the night or the beauty of the river before we wandered back to our hotel. Expecting, too, that I would find everything as I had seen it a moment before, with Joshua gripping Anne Marie around the waist to prevent her from lurching into the water, and Natty staring into a stack of crates where another consignment of lobsters was stealthily signaling to her.

  But nothing was the same.

  Nothing.

  Natty, Joshua and Anne Marie were all in a line with their backs to the river, bolt upright and apparently cold sober. Two other figures were guarding them, standing no more than five yards away and lit from behind by lamps in the tavern window.

  I did not need to ask who they were. The Painted Man was crouched with a knife in one hand, his weight shifting from one foot to another and his decorations rippling across his shoulders—red and gold and ochre and white, as though he was winged with fire. Or winged with blood. Black Cloud was slowly shaking his head and stepping forward to show himself more clearly. His face was a skull carved from stone, the lips full and dry, his face yellowish and heavy-looking. He kept coming. Another step, then another, until he was only a yard away. Close as when his eyes had bulged at me from the boat following the Angel. Close as when he first strode into our prison and hauled me to and fro pounding his name into my head.

  Black Cloud. Black Cloud. Black Cloud.

  The silence between us was immense, and as the moon floated out from a cloud-bank I studied him inch by inch: the greasy black hair swept back from his forehead; the nose like a hawk’s beak; the sunken cheeks; the sleek muscles swelling in the neck and shoulders; the thick body; the hands and feet too large, as though all his energy had flowed out from the center and congealed there, giving him an unearthly strength.

  “Mister Jim.” It seemed the air itself had spoken, and all the floating pieces of my brain suddenly rushed together.

  “You learned my name,” I heard myself say. The steadiness of our voices astonished me; we might have been friends meeting after a little separation. “And you speak my language.”

  “It is not difficult,” he said. “English is arriving everywhere.”

  “I suppose so,” I said, still hungry for every detail of him—the bristles prickling along his cheek and jawline, the flaking cracks in his lips, the bronze in his skin, the stubby eyelashes. This was my avenger. This was my death. And my privilege was to see him precisely. Yet it was also my privilege to know how wrong I had been. In all my dreams he had been exceptional, almost a god. Now I knew he was an ordinary man, his voice shrunk with thirst and his eyes bloodshot with the dust blown into them by the desert winds. It was not his strangeness that frightened me any more, but the opposite. He terrified me because he felt so familiar.

  “Why did you take so long?” I was playing for time, but Black Cloud seemed content with this; he knew I could never escape him now.

  “Two years is not long,” he said, with the trace of a smile in his voice. “No time is long to me. I looked for you, then I went back to my house. I left my house and I looked again. Then I went back to my house and looked a third time. I almost found you—but…” He raised his right hand to his left shoulder and pulled aside his tunic to show me a wrinkle in the skin, where it had healed over a wound.

  “You see?” he said. “Your friend was clever and you escaped. But I knew where you would go.”

  “Then why not come here first?” I asked. “You could have waited for us.”

  “I could not wait,” he said. “You have what is mine.”

  “Which is?” I said, but this was too much like foolishness and Black Cloud was suddenly impatient.

  “You know the answer,” he snapped. “What is mine.” As he spat the last word, he stooped to press his forehead hard against my own and I felt his heat seeping through my skin as though his thoughts were burning into my brain.

  “Mine,” he kept saying, his sour breath swarming over my face. “Mine, mine, mine.”

  Then he straightened again, and as his heat diminished I put my hand to my chest. Black Cloud focused there for a second, but he still did not know the satchel was inside my shirt.

  I gabbled at him some more to throw him off. “You have traveled a long way,” I said. Preposterous again, but for a moment good enough. He spun toward the mouth of the river, where the night-wind wandered about the islands of the estuary; he seemed to be listening for something he could not hear, looking for something he could not see; then he lost patience again and turned back.

  To rob me, I thought. But just as I expected to feel his hand thrusting inside my shirt, and the tug as he wrenched the satchel from its strap, a shudder ran through the muscles of his neck and along his arm into his fingers. I looked down and saw the quick shine of a knife. When the tip of the blade cut me I felt a hot dash of blood.

  “Jim!” I heard Natty cry. She had seen this blood; it was darkening my shirt.

  “It’s only a scratch,” I told her, then wished I had not. Black Cloud would hurt me again now; he would cut me more deeply.

  Instead, he rocked back on his heels and indolently lifted the knife away, throwing back his head and showing his large yellow teeth, smearing me with the fish-smell on his breath.

  “A scratch,” he said lazily. “You are right. A scratch.” He did not care because he knew he could kill me whenever he wanted.

  My wound started to sting me then and I hid my face. I wanted to clear my mind. To think. I should give him the necklace as Natty and I had so often said we must, then I should plead for our lives. But as I stayed hunched over, with my eyes shut and my blood booming in my ears, I still refused to do this.

  “It’s not yours any more. It’s mine,” I whispered. “It’s—”

  Black Cloud would not let me finish. He bounded forward, seized me by the hair as he had done in our prison, and jerked me upright so fast I felt the skin tightening all over my face.

  “That is a lie,” he snarled. “A lie, Mister Jim. You are no better than the rest, though you think you are. You are a liar.”

  I could not reply. Where was Natty, I wondered in a kind of daze; she would know how to answer. When I glanced up I saw that she had stepped so close to the Painted Man his knife was hovering an inch from her throat. Her eyes glittered and the lamplight streamed over her green satin dress.

  “Here!” she said to the Painted Man, seizing the moment by daring him to hurt her, nudging forward until the point of the knife actually touched her throat—which made Joshua reach out and grab her arm to hold her back. As he did this I remembered the gun in his belt, the silver shining pistol. Why not use it now? Why not shoot the Painted Man, then turn on Black Cloud and shoot him as well, and so finish everything?

  Because he was cunning, that was the only explanation. He was planning to let Black Cloud murder me and Natty, then kill the murderers himself, so that he could collect the necklace and begin the life he wanted.

  I lunged toward Natty to protect her but that was my mistake. As I stretched out my hand, the satchel slipped from beneath my shirt and Black Cloud saw it at once. “Is it here now?” he gasped. “Now?” He did not wait for my reply, only tucked his knife back into his belt and gripped my shoulder, holding me steady while he grabbed the satchel and ripped it away from me; as the strap broke it made a sharp little twang and burned the skin of my neck. Then he shoved me aside like rubbish; I no longer held any use for him.

  “Ah!” He flipped open the mouth of the satchel and when he plunged his hand inside I heard the separate pieces of the necklace chiming together, slick and heavy and warm. His eyes widened as he felt the weight. He held it. He drew it out and hoisted it to eye level, grasping it by the knot which had once rested on the nape of my neck, and before that on his own, so all the pieces swung free and the whole design became clear. As they caught the light from the window behind him, an
d reflections from the river in front, the creatures carved along the individual pieces once more began to crawl and glide, sliding into and through one another, endlessly moving and always still.

  I forced myself back to Natty again but she was safe suddenly; the Painted Man was no longer interested in her, any more than Black Cloud was interested in me. He wanted to stand as close as possible to Black Cloud, who was lifting the necklace even higher above his head now, letting the silver light splash down onto them both equally, glittering over their skin and dribbling into their eyes and noses and mouths.

  This was our chance to escape! But it never occurred to me. In the clear light pouring over our enemies, all I could think about was how soon they would finish their gloating, and lead us away from the wharf and into the shadows where they would murder us. Where they would slice the scalps from our heads so our spirits would not rise again, and slash the tendons of our legs so we would never run through the world in our afterlives. Where they would fling us into the river and forget us,

  “Jim!”

  Natty was calling to me now but calmly, almost matter-of-fact.

  “Jim,” she repeated. “Look!” For a moment I thought I had jumped from one dream to another. Black Cloud and the Painted Man were still as I had seen them a moment before, with their backs turned to the wall of the inn, but they were no longer admiring the necklace. They had let it go. They had dropped it onto the wharf beside my satchel. And all their quickness had drained out of them—all of it, just in a few seconds.

  I had been wrong again about Joshua. He had never wanted to harm us; he had only been waiting for his moment. While Black Cloud and the Painted Man were gazing at their treasure, and while I was lost in thoughts of my own murder, he had decided it was time to undo the buttons of his topcoat and pull the silver pistol from his belt. Now he was pointing it toward our enemies.