The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  The little man shoved Marie aside, facing me with the knife, swaying with the erratic motion of the train, his face working.

  “That ain’t gon’ do nothin’ for ya,” I said calmly.

  He jabbed with the knife, but in his face was the rumpled, unsteady look of death. As I’d been earlier, he was past caring, past even the limits of wanting to care.

  “Whatever you done,” I said, “it ain’t no worse’n things we everyone of us done. Maybe you did wrong with your companions, but you saved a life once you got on board. Nobody here can fault ya. But y’can’t go ’round hurtin’ people to make yourself feel better. You think about that, now.”

  He appeared to be obeying my instructions, to be thinking things over, but I guess there was just too much wrongness in his head, too much trouble in his past for thought to make any sense. I had relaxed a bit, expecting him to see reason, and when he came at me, quicker than I would have believed possible, I wasn’t prepared and took a slice on my arm. I gritted my teeth against the pain and tried to grab him, but he ducked and darted past me and out the door. He stood between the cars, a shadowy figure hanging on to the safety railing. The train was rocketing along now, and I understood what he intended and that he had no chance. But he was no longer my responsibility, and so I only watched and waited. He glanced back into the car, and I could feel his yearning, the weight of his anguish, all the shattering displacement of what he’d hoped being overwhelmed by what he knew. Then he swung out over the rail and vanished into the black rush of night. If he gave a cry, it was lost in the thunder of our passage.

  Dispirited, wondering why I had bothered to save Marie, wishing I could have done more for Crisp, I sat back down beside Cole, ignoring the gabble from the rear of the car. Marie was sobbing, the farmers all talking at once.

  Cole passed me the bourbon. “You didn’t handle that real good.”

  “’Bout as good as you handled me.” I had a slug of bourbon and began wrapping a bandanna about my arm.

  We were moving down into the deep forest, and all I could make out of the great plain through the ragged silhouettes of the evergreens was intermittent glints of silvery water and unearthly fire. I finished wrapping my arm, had some more bourbon, and leaned back.

  “Are we all right?” I asked Cole. “We past havin’ more trouble?”

  Cole said, “Most likely,” and reclaimed his bourbon. After a while he asked what I planned to do now…now that everything had changed for me.

  I gave a bitter laugh. “Guess I’m still bound for Glory.”

  He made a noncommittal noise and drank.

  “That’s sure one hell of a ride,” I said.

  I gazed off along the car, at the dried blood and the farmers, at Marie, huge and depressed, muffled in her coat. Despite everything, I couldn’t work up hatred for her. All my emotions had been fired, leaving me with empty chambers and the stink of cordite. A shudder went through me, not of cold, but some last residue voiding itself, a dry heave of the spirit.

  Tracy, I thought, and then even that was gone.

  “What’s there to do after you done this?” I asked, feeling hopeless and cold. “What’s left?”

  Cole had another swig of bourbon; he rinsed it around in his mouth before he swallowed, then looked out the window at the dark world rushing past. He was wearing a distant expression, and his pupils appeared to have shrunk into tiny black keyholes. Finally he shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “Turn around and go back the other way was all I could ever figger,” he said.

  I took a room in Glory. It was a tiny, crooked room with a slanted ceiling and leaning walls, dirty, cold as a penny. From the window I could see ramshackle buildings and rutted dirt streets marbled with crusts of snow. By day, buckboards slotted along the ruts while women in wool shawls and long skirts hustled past. Men loaded and unloaded kegs of nails and grain sacks and bales of straw, and stopped into the saloons for a drink or three. Their children chased one another, ducking under horses and wagons, pelting each other with snowballs. Nights, there was some wildness—tinny piano music, gunshots, shrieks—but not so much as there had been in White Eagle. As far as I could tell from living there a week, every town I’d ever known ought to have been called Glory, because they were all pretty damn much the same.

  There were refugees, of course. They slept in alleys and doorways, wherever it was dark and there was a chance of making it through the night without being beaten. None of the citizens wanted them around, what with their peculiar habits and deformities, but they were tolerated due to some Christian twitch. I would sit by my window and watch them slink about and wonder if I wasn’t one of them myself. I hadn’t bothered looking up my friends to borrow money. That was a plan I’d concocted with Tracy, and even if she had been there, I doubt I could have stuck to it. I had changed, and few of my old obsessions had any meaning. Instead, I got a job swamping out a saloon, which paid enough for food and shelter and—on occasion—for a woman to share my crooked room. The women made me happy, but not for long. Once they were gone, I would go to stand in the dark and spy on life. I saw a thousand things I wanted, but none I wanted enough to seize, nothing that inspired me to grab and take a bite and laugh with the joy of fulfilled desire. I was as empty as I’d been at the beginning of the ride from White Eagle, and whenever I looked into mirrors I saw a man on the run from himself, a man who was growing sick and weak again.

  Spring faded, summer died, fall ebbed. I won a horse in a poker game, a shit-brown, sore-kneed, mean-tempered animal that I kept only because I was in no position to throw anything away. I hated that horse, and I would have sooner gotten cozy with a skunk than put a saddle on him. But one morning I realized I had become so sick of myself that I couldn’t stand the room any longer. It reeked of my hangovers, my sodden incapacities. I packed a bedroll, mounted up, and headed east for Steadley, again thinking that what I needed was a new place, a new start. But the ride came to be a remedy in itself. The air so crisp it flowed into my lungs like cool fire, and the sky that potent blue you only find on the backside of creation, with high scribbled lines of birds and snow peaks in the distance. I had intended to do some soul-searching, to try and gain a perspective on things. But it appeared that merely by leaving Glory I had gained sufficient perspective, and I experienced sweeps of emotion that in their purity seemed to embody the perfection of the sky, the shining mountains, and the momentum of the land, the great flow of it eastward, rising and declining with the smoothness of ocean swells. My body felt clean, my head free of worries. Even the horse’s temper had improved.

  A day and a half later when Steadley hove into view, a gaggle of weathered frame buildings that differed from Glory only by its greater size and the profusion of its squalor, I was not yet ready to end my ride, and I figured I would keep going awhile and pitch camp in the hills east of town. Weather closed in, the sky grayed, and fat white flakes started to fall. But when I reached the hills, I was still eager to continue, and as the light faded toward dusk, I told myself I’d ride a few miles more, close—yet not too close—to the edge of the Patch. I moved into evergreen forest, following the railroad tracks, which were banked high with snow that had fallen the previous week, finding peace among the dark trees. Tiny birds with white bellies and black caps were hopping thick as fleas beneath them; in their nervous agitation, they reminded me of how my thoughts had been working recently. Wind whirled up fresh powder from the snow crust, stretched it out into veils that went flowing across the banks and glittered for a moment before dissipating; the heavy snow-laden boughs of the firs barely trembled.

  I was preparing to scout about for a campsite when I heard the train from Steadley coming and spotted its smoke unwinding above the treetops; a minute later I saw the locomotive round a bend, sparks fluming from its smokestack, a gigantic black beast out of hell, its brass cowcatcher looking like golden needle teeth in the decaying light. It was on an upgrade, moving at a relatively slow pace, and I urg
ed the horse into a trot alongside, looking in the windows, studying the frightened faces of the passengers. As the end of a car passed, a man with a shotgun leaned out between cars and shouted for me to keep away. Cole. Even at that distance I had a strong impression of his eyes, a sense of their bizarre black configurations.

  “Hey, Cole!” I called out. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  He peered at me, leaning farther out, hanging on to the safety rail. “Ain’t you the ol’ boy put a hole in my hip?”

  I waved. “How you been?”

  “Tolerable…and you?”

  “Shit, I’m doin’ fine as a man can do!” Strangely enough, I believed it.

  “Where the hell you think you goin’?” Cole shouted as the train began to pick up speed. “We ’bout into the Patch!”

  “Well, that’s where I’m goin’!” His warning didn’t affect me…or not the way I would have expected, anyway. I felt challenged, excited, alive. I urged the horse into a gallop, plunging through the snow, and was astounded by the ease with which he responded.

  “You’re crazy! Don’t you ’member what I said? Ain’t gon’ be the same for ya this time! There’s gon’ be changes!”

  I laughed. “Don’t tell me you ain’t never wanted to go out into it, to find what’s there. You can’t see it without feelin’ that way.”

  He nodded. “Oh, yeah! I’ve had me that feelin’ a time or two.”

  “Then c’mon with me!” I spurred the horse faster. “We’d make a pair, we would! We’d scare all the monsters into hidin’!”

  He just grinned.

  “C’mon!” I yelled. “What’ve you got to lose? We’ll be the kings of the goddamn place! C’mon with me!”

  And I believed that, too—that we could see all of the wonders and intricacies of the Patch, all its violent lights and darks, and come through victorious. I was heady with that knowledge.

  A plume of smoke from the engine swirled between us, and after it had passed, he called, “Naw, that’s your bad fortune, not mine!”

  The train was pulling away from me, heading for another curve, and as it began to angle around it, Cole yelled, “Luck to you!”

  “I don’t need luck!” I told him. “I gotta special moon watches over me, I’m part of an infinite design. I got more fire in me than that ol’ engine of yours. What do I need with luck?”

  “Take it anyhow!” he cried, waving with his shotgun, and then the car jolted around the bend, and I saw him no more.

  I had thought all my brave words were merely bluster, that once he had gone out of sight, I would rein in the horse and find myself a campsite, but I kept urging the horse to run faster. And it was not just my urging that commanded us, because I noticed then that the horse had changed, become a force of its own, a great dark engine with a steaming heart that pulled me along and helped me abide by a decision that I realized I had already made, that I’d made long before I left Glory. I recalled watching Tracy run for the cover of the woods, how I’d thought of her as running away from danger; but seeing her in my mind’s eye, I knew that she had been running for joy, for life, fueled by all the brilliant thoughtlessness that was empowering me now. That was it, you see. There was no logic to my act, no sense, no plan. I was free of all that, free of fetters I’d never known existed, of impediments so subtle in their hold that I couldn’t even name them, and I was running as I had not since I had been a boy, for the pure muscular exhilaration of the act, with the wind a fire at my back, and the snow blowing up into phantoms, and the dark trees like fortress towers, and the whole world ahead of me a richness of absolutes. The things I knew just from breathing in that snow-crystaled, stinging air! Philosophies were squeezed into shape by the clenching of my fist, principles bred like tears in the corners of my eyes. My mind was white with knowing.

  To my amazement, we were beginning to catch up with the train. That horse of mine was a marvel, each of his strides carrying us an improbable distance. I could not see his face, but I knew the measure of his change, his eyes aglow like miners’ lanterns, his teeth sharp and capable of tearing, his hooves driving sparks from the stones. And I felt as well the measure of my own change. It wasn’t what I might have picked had I had a choice, but it was true to myself in a way that I would never have admitted before. My heart was a furious cell, my brain flocked with outlaw desires, my hands fit for loving and killing and little in between. For evil…though I didn’t look at it that way, not anymore. Evil had ceased to be an abstraction to me. It was as plain and comprehensible as a lump of coal, a black fist that could burn and give off flame, a tool that enabled me to survive, and being no longer mysterious, it no longer deserved a fancy word like evil to describe it—it was merely a part of what I was, a talent, a quality as indistinguishable from my whole self as a single sparkle of a gemstone.

  I spurred my horse and went coursing past the last car. I matched the train’s pace and looked in through the window at a pretty woman in a blue dress. I stared at the plump swell of her breasts and wanted her with a blaze of dizzy passion that came near to unseating me. She drew back, pale and alarmed, a hand to her mouth. God only knew what face I presented to the world…or maybe I did have some idea, for when I swept off my hat, intending to salute her with a bow, I felt several bony projections rising from my cranium, like the knobs of a primitive crown, and I laughed at the thought that a gray demon king might be rising from the ashes of my faint heart. There was a vicious glee in my laughter that—had I heard it at any other time—would have made my spit dry and my balls shrivel into seeds. But now I loved to hear it, knowing it for the signal music of a new life. I considered swinging up onto the car and taking the woman, but she offered nothing I would not find in more vital form out upon the vast glowing plain that lay to the north. The other passengers pressed close to the window, peering out at me, and I wondered what they were thinking. Was I simply the personification of their fears, or did they see in me a man who had lost everything? Did they sense the sweetness of my release? Could they guess at the years of dismal self-deception that lay behind me? Did they realize that I was like themselves, someone who had come to the end of his dodges and been forced to travel a road that he had tried for years to avoid, only to discover that it was life itself he had been avoiding?

  I rode alongside them awhile, engaging their eyes soberly, trying to convey the tragedy of my long decline and the good news of my escape. I would have shouted out to them, but I knew they would not understand me. We were separated not merely by a quarter-inch of glass and a few feet of snowy ground, but by the potent enchantment of the Patch and the lesser enchantment of my choice. Or perhaps the fact that they had yet to make their own choices was the greatest barrier between us. Then, giving up forever on the world, I reined my horse northward, swerving down through the evergreens, smashing aside the boughs with my strong right hand and sending up clouds of snow behind, bound at last for glory, the only kind accessible to those who have failed at ordinary grace, bound for heat and pleasure, for the end of limits and the final places of love and power, bound for death by dreaming, for the joys of hell and the pains of paradise and all the pretty mysteries beyond.

  From my pulpit, carved of ebony into a long-snouted griffin’s head, I can see the sins of my parishioners. It’s as if a current is flowing from face to face, illuminating the secret meaning of every wrinkle and line and nuance of expression. They—like their sins—are an ordinary lot. Children as fidgety as gnats. Ruddy-cheeked men possessed by the demons of real estate, solid citizens with weak hearts and brutal arguments for wives. Women whose thoughts slide like swaths of gingham through their minds, married every one to lechers and layabouts. Yet for all their commonality, the congregation is remarkable in that their sins mesh, are wholly compatible with one another. For every potential pederast there is a young boy in the first flush of his deviancy, for every violent urge a seeker of pain, and for every bitter widow a lust of knitting-needle sharpness with which to mend the piecework of her days. This h
as always seemed to me a circumstance worth exploiting, though until recently I had no idea as to how that should be done.

  Not only can I see my parishioners’ sins, I am able to experience them, both talents visited upon me by, I believe, the church. It is an ancient house of worship, its white plaster walls and black beams emblematic of the Puritan rigor whose sanctity it was built to guarantee, and it is graced by twelve stained-glass windows, each depicting a beast framed by a border of grape leaves. Legend tells that its cool dry air seethes with the caliginous spirits of old killed witches, most of them dead at the hands of the first pastor here, one Jeremy Calder, a man gone bloody with the love of God. However, I doubt his astral presence or that of his victims is responsible for the inception of my psychic gifts. No, rather I feel these gifts are a product of the essence of the place and time, for that, it strikes me, is the nature of all extremes of reality, be they good or evil: that they are bred from the interaction of a thousand ephemera, the conjunction of congruent normalcies that together act to compound an anomaly…But I was going to tell you how I experience my congregation’s sins.

  This morning as I stand on the steps in my surplice after the eleven o’clock service, with the red-and-yellow leaves of the sycamores and birches that line the street bristling and flashing like semaphores under the high sun, I greet each by name and shake their hands, and with every touch a vision opens in my brain. Take Emily Prideau, now. Child of Bess and Robert. Sixteen years old; nubile; sweet. Her breasts molded into prim curves by the pink starched decorum of her Sunday dress. Yet from her fingers courses the vision of a midnight wood, where cross-armed she lifts her sweater and those heavy breasts bound free, globed pale and perfect by the moonlight; and next, smiling, she looses her wraparound skirt, proving underwearless, erecting the dry-throated boy who gazes dumbstruck at her curly secret. “Do me first,” she says, and as he kneels to her, I feel the jolt of pleasure triggered by his tongue.