The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  “She ain’t gon’ hurt you!” he said. “She’s changin’ into this kinda animal what lives ’round here in the forests. They peaceful, they just wanna be left alone!”

  I thought it strange that he would forget his own peril and go to the defense of a mere animal; I had the idea that he was trying to compensate for something.

  The others kept on yammering, and Crisp screeched at them, waving his arms. “You stupid bastards! You wanna kill everything comin’ outta the Patch, don’tcha? Y’wanna stomp ’em like bugs! But know who you killin’? Your friends, your sisters, your cousins. Folks who’s cither foolish or sinned against. It ain’t no life out there, not for a man. But it’s a life all the same, and you got no call to deny it to somethin’s got only that much life left.”

  Some of the passengers appeared mortified, but then the thing behind the seat—I couldn’t think of it as Tracy—set up a mewling, and they started in on me again.

  “You don’t finish ’er,” Marie said, “then Cole will.”

  I made no response.

  “Hell,” she said, patting her dress into a semblance of order, “I think I’ll go get him right now.”

  She came toward me, went sideways in order to scoot by, and when she did that, I caught her by the neck, forced her back over one of the seats, and shoved the barrel of the gun up under her chin. In the sickly light her doughy face with its bruises and dimples resembled something I might have dreamed after a heavy meal and too much brandy, even less human in its revolting stamp than Crisp’s face. I cocked the gun, and her eyes swiveled down, trying to see my hand.

  “Help me!” she said weakly; then she screamed it. “Help! Help me, Cole! He’s killin’ me!”

  There was a scrabbling noise behind me, and I pushed Marie away. The animal was jumping about, moving with the sinuous speed of a ferret, clawing the windows, apparently terrified by Marie’s screams. Through rips in Tracy’s underclothes, which still clung to it, I saw that its body was all whipcord muscle. The skin had darkened to a midnight blue. The face, too, had darkened, though not so much as the rest, and it had simplified, the features acquiring a cast that was somehow both feline and reptilian, the mouth thinner, wider, and the nose a pair of curved slits. But the eyes, huge and yellow, with translucent membranes like crystal lenses—they carried the sadness I’d heard in that cry. And in the lineaments of the face, minimal though they were, I could still make out the remnant of Tracy’s troubled beauty. It was awful to detect her essence in that creature. Weakness flooded me. I wanted to work some magic and call her back to the human. Yet at the same time I wanted to release her, and I had the thought that this might be the best she could hope for, not to have failed with me again, but to have changed utterly, to have gone beyond herself into a world where failure and success was a simple affair, something wholly of her own making.

  Marie had stopped her squawling. She had slumped into one of the seats, holding her dumpling gut, and Crisp was standing over her, muttering curses. The farmers were keeping their distance. The animal was tearing away the remains of Tracy’s clothing, letting out feral hisses, and I figured that if it couldn’t escape soon, it might decide that attacking us was its only hope for survival. Having reached the steepest section of the grade, the train was barely moving, and I went to a window, intending to bust it out with my gun butt, thinking I might be able to persuade the animal to jump through. But as I took hold of the barrel, and prepared to swing, Cole came back into the car. I reversed my grip and threw down on him before he could bring his shotgun up to fire at the animal.

  “Use that hogleg, and you’re a dead man!” I told him.

  He looked haggard, his black shirt was ripped. “Don’t be foolin’ with me, son,” he said. “She ain’t nothin’ to you no more. Just you stand aside and lemme do my job.”

  “I mean it,” I said, seeing that he was bracing himself in front of the open door.

  “I should clean your plow for ya, boy,” he said, his tone even and easy, “but I’m gon’ give you a chance to reconsider ’cause you done me a service. Now you stop with this here bullshit. All you doin’ is makin’ things worse for ever’body…your woman included.”

  Cole was blind—I understood that now. He had been too long on the line, he was operating on the basis of judgments made years before and was incapable of weighing the case now before him. In the seams of his worn face was written a language of unyielding principle. He had, as he had said, seen too much, and so he came to disregard anything that demanded his attention. But my vision was new and clear. I could see his eerie pupils contracting, appearing to change like the spots on a magical deck of cards, going hearts to clubs to spades, each design more ominous than the last. I saw the muscles tense in his neck, his shoulders. I knew what he intended.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said, letting my voice falter, my words thick with resignation. “I don’t know what to do.”

  I dropped my eyes a mite, waited until I saw him relax, then I shot him in the hip, sending him spinning down against the wall. His shotgun discharged into the ceiling, and leaving a few last shreds of Tracy’s petticoat on the floor, the animal bolted for the door, flowed through it and was gone. I jumped over Cole, who was twisting about, saying, “Shit! Oh, Jesus!” and went to stand between the cars. As I’ve mentioned, the train had slowed to a crawl, and so I had a good long look at what I’d learned to love too late running away from me.

  The land sloped sharply down from the tracks, a decline of moonlit hummocky snow that gave out into evergreen forest, and beyond the base of the hill, beyond the edge of the trees, lay a plain that stretched to the horizon. It was the heart of the Patch. I’d never seen it before, but I could tell that’s what it was. It was such a place, that plain, as you might envision after chewing some of those cactus buds that Indians sell in the Mexican marketplaces, and yet strangely enough, it was familiar too, comfortably familiar in the way of those cool rotten-leaf smells that drift up from shady rivers and the taste of larrup syrup and the sight of deer hiding in among some post oaks with their white flags raised. Wild stars and pale enormities of cloud overhead, a sky of such complex immensity that it seemed an entity unto itself, the embodiment of a profound emotion. Darkly iridescent points of land hooked out into water that had the gleam of tarnished silver, a great river feeding a country of virgin timber and solitary cabins—nodes of inconstant fire lodged in the vast gloomy sweep. There were fountains of light, gouts of indigo and crimson and viridian, spraying up from secret places like the souls of magicians taking flight, and areas where witchy glows flickered. Islands of phosphorescence effloresced and faded in the farthest reaches like universes being born, and shadows with no apparent source passed across the face of the water. Lightnings touched the earth and spread glittering tides. The place was lovely and evil, serene and fulminant, intimate and infinite. Impossible to characterize or judge. There was no end to its mysterious detail. And running over the snow toward all that majestic confusion and silent tumult was Tracy…I had accepted that weird lithe creature as being her, because I had finally given up on her, finally let her go, and because I knew just from seeing it that the Patch wasn’t the hell I had imagined, that while it might seem inimical to me, for others it was the only home possible, and that it held out the opportunity for rewards that my world couldn’t offer. Good and evil were more sharply defined within its perimeters, and there was a grandeur to its freedom and wildness, in the endless reach of the solitudes, in the feeling that whatever fate was to be yours, it was something worked out from your deeds and not a weakness bred into you and reinforced by lies. I had felt something of that freedom and wildness in the big gray-skinned man, though at the time I couldn’t have put it into words. For certain I had known that he needed something other than our lives, something he had not been able to say and hadn’t trusted me to understand. In truth, I could not have understood under the circumstances. But now, seeing more clearly than I had, I believed we might have made a compact, est
ablished a bond that would have prevented the deaths. And what about Crisp? What about all the pitiful refugees who came wandering back to the world? Half-changed men, unsuited for life in either place. That, I realized, had to be the case. Crisp had hinted of it in his defense of Tracy, and I thought I must be like that myself—born too much for one world, too little for the other. Wrong by an inch for happiness. Or not happiness. I could no longer accept that true happiness existed. For strength, for constancy.

  As I contemplated this, I watched Tracy receding, growing smaller and smaller, darkening against the snowfield. Sort of like watching a hole being burned in white paper by a match held behind it, only in reverse, the hole dwindling and ultimately vanishing. It was not until after she had gone into the shadows of the trees that I felt her loss, and it wasn’t the tearing pain I might have expected; it was softer, a sweet fall of darkness over the heart, a luminous ache that seemed to light the gloom it created. I realized that I had lost Tracy long ago, and that only this minute had I begun to miss her.

  At last, shivering with cold, I went back into the car. My bullet had ripped a furrow in Cole’s hip, yet had done him no serious damage. Someone had bandaged him, and he was sitting with his legs straight out on the floor; his color was off, but otherwise he appeared to be sound. He had a quart of Emerson’s Bourbon in hand. He gazed up at me sorrowfully.

  “You a damn fool, y’know that?” he said without malice, just making an observation.

  I flopped down next to him. “You were wrong to wanna shoot her, man. Dead wrong.”

  He was not interested in the topic. “I should lock you up,” he said. “Maybe that’d improve your judgment.”

  “I’ll testify for ya, Cole,” Marie said. “You can count on that.”

  She was back in her seat. They were all sitting, the battered and bloodied farmers, the elderly lady, all displaying the same self-absorbed attitudes that they had at the start of the trip. Only Crisp, who was rocking back and forth, his face buried in his hands, showed any sign of having endured a rough passage. He was talking to himself, agitated words that I could not make out, and now and again slamming a fist into his thigh. I had neither the energy nor the right pitch to console him.

  “You don’t bring charges,” Marie said to Cole, primping in a hand mirror, dabbing powder onto her bruises, “then I will. I ain’t about to have my person assaulted way it’s been this trip.”

  “Shut your hole, Marie,” Cole said wearily; he shifted and winced.

  “Sorry ’bout that.” I nodded at his hip.

  “I’ve had worse.”

  “Well, I’m amazed,” I told him. “If I’d known people took gettin’ shot as good as you, I’d have shot a sight more of ’em in my time.”

  He grunted with amusement.

  Marie stared at him, dumbfounded. “You ain’t just gon’ forget about this, are ya? He’s committed a blood crime!”

  “Puttin’ this boy away ain’t gon’ cure nothin’,” Cole said. “Hell, I could use him on the line if he…”

  “I doubt I’m up to it,” I cut in. “’Sides, that’s your bad fortune, and not mine.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” he said. “It’s like I told you—you come into the Patch again, I doubt you’ll be so lucky with the changes.”

  “I ain’t been that damn lucky this time,” I said.

  We had reached the top of the grade and started down, picking up speed with every second. I gazed out the window at the sweep of the plain, the shining waters and dark curves of land—it seemed that the whole expanse formed a single fabulous image like a character in some ancient script or a symbol on a treasure map. And there must be treasure out there, I thought. There must be a million sights worth seeing, a million things worth having. I imagined Tracy somewhere, asleep in its shadows, her old life receded to a dream.

  “I don’t believe this!” Marie said. “Man puts a bullet in you, and you sayin’ you’d offer him a job?”

  “You can pick your nose,” Cole said with a grin that spread a net of wrinkles across his face. “But you can’t pick your friends.”

  “He almost got us killed!” Marie heaved up from her seat, hands on hips. “You do what you want, but I ain’t gon’ stand by and see him get off scot-free! I’m goin’ straight to the sheriff in Steadley and have him swear out papers on this hellion! And if you think I’m…”

  With an inarticulate yell, Crisp sprang to his feet. He turned this way and that as if unsure of whom he wanted to address. “There’s this place in the Patch,” he said, emoting like a preacher, “this place so bad can’t nothin’ but the worst of ’em stand to be there. The ones who’s monsters, the ones who sleep on what they kill and shit their babies. It makes hell look like Sunday school. Fire don’t warm you, it just hurts your eyes. The snow’s white insects, the rain cuts like razors.” He hustled over to Marie, whipped a knife out from his ragged sleeve; he put the edge to her throat. “I’m takin’ you there, bitch! I’m takin’ you right to there, ’cause that’s where you fuckin’ belong!” He hauled Marie into the aisle. “Don’t nobody try and stop me! I’ll bleed ’er here’n now!”

  I regarded him wearily. Much as I would have liked to see Marie dragged out into the Patch, I couldn’t let him do it. Maybe there was more of Cole in me than I’d figured. I came to my feet, and Crisp nicked her, bringing a rill of blood out from Marie’s saggy jowl; she squeaked and went stiff.

  “I ain’t gon’ interfere with ya, man,” I said. “I just wanna ask you a coupla questions…all right?”

  That didn’t sit too well with him, but he said, “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Those men you come aboard with, you say they wanted to kill us, but that big fella was askin’ me somethin’? What was he askin’?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said you was pretendin’ to be one of ’em, you must know their language.”

  He opened his mouth slowly, reminding me of a fish trying to get its lips around a pebble it had mistaken for food; but he did not reply.

  “I was thinkin’ ’bout this woman y’got here,” I said. “’Bout why she’s so damn nasty. Way I figger, she’s just scared of who she is, hatin’ herself ’cause she’s so fat and useless and don’t belong nowhere. She ain’t got nothin’ better to do than ride this stinkin’ train back and forth. She can’t hate herself enough to satisfy, so she takes it out on other people. She don’t really wanna hurt ’em, she just ain’t got the guts to hurt herself.”

  “What you talkin’ about? You talkin’ crazy!” Crisp looked to the others as if for confirmation.

  “You come aboard with these other two, and you turn on ’em. Then you tell us you was always plannin’ to turn on ’em, that you was just playin’ along till you had a chance to switch sides. They was gonna hurt us, you say. But be that as it may, you wasn’t square with ’em…and not ’cause you cared ’bout us, but ’cause you was afraid.”

  “What’d you want me to do? Let ’em kill you?”

  “You would have done anything to get outta the Patch. You weren’t like them others. Don’t matter what they were, you just wasn’t one of ’em. You didn’t belong with ’em, and you was too scared to think about anything except that. But once you was shut of ’em, alone with us, it was the exact same situation. You was scared of us, you felt you didn’t belong. You could feel that this wasn’t your answer either, that you was as wrong here as you was in the Patch. Still, you had to make us believe you was one of us, so you went on ’bout how you betrayed your companions to save our lives. Like you said…just playin’ along.”

  “Naw,” Crisp said, “naw, that ain’t how it was.”

  “’Course, then you started hatin’ yourself ’cause you betrayed ’em, and ’cause you couldn’t hate yourself enough to satisfy, you picked out ol’ Marie here to hate. Now I admit she’s easy to hate. But when you get right down to it, what she been doin’ ain’t no different than what you doin’, now is it?”

  The tension had drained fr
om Crisp. He looked hopeless, beaten, and I knew I had him. I was full of truth and clear-seeing, as sure and righteous in my stance as a preacher with all the weight of scripture behind him. I had him given up and gone—all I had to do was to keep on talking, wearing him out with the dismal truth.

  “Don’t you see?” I asked him. “There ain’t nowhere in this world you ever gon’ feel at home. And stickin’ some pathetic woman what’s the same as you just gon’ make things worse.”

  “Lemme be!” Crisp shouted. “Just lemme be!”

  “What was the big man askin’?”

  “Nothin’! I don’t know!”

  “What was he askin’?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know!”

  “What’d he want? Food…is that it? Medicine? Fuel?”

  It appeared that Crisp couldn’t decide whether to smile at me, to try and win me over, or to snarl. That rotted jack-o’-lantern head wobbled like it was about to fall off his neck.

  “You don’t have to answer,” I said. “’Cause I don’t know what exactly he wanted, but I do know it wasn’t blood.”

  Crisp let out a terrible moan, a sound so full of pain it seemed the result of an actual blow.

  “Our help’s what he wanted,” I said. “He wasn’t hopin’ for it too much, but he was willin’ to chance askin’ me a question just in case I was smart enough to understand.”