by Dyer Wilk
But he still didn’t feel safe.
It was Bill Webb who found the cave.
He’d gone wandering off, searching down by the banks of the narrow river, where the trees leaned over the water to offer shade from the merciless sun. A quarter mile east, he came to a spot where the wall of the canyon curved inward, forming a natural overhang that kissed up against the grove beside the shore.
When Gordon saw it for himself, he was felt an overwhelming sense of familiarity. As if he had been here before.
It was in the shape of the rocks and the twisting of the roots in the sandy soil, the way the river bent in a lazy curve, and the waters slowed to almost mirror stillness, reflecting the sky above and memory now ten years distant.
In the summer of ’79, he had come west to the territory to make his fortune in silver. He and Tom Talbert had staked a claim in a remote canyon, far from the boom in the open country where the prospectors were cheating and killing each other for prime land. They had spent two months living off of canned beans and rabbit meat, sweating out long days beneath an overhang of red rock, churning up tons of earth and finding nothing. As summer turned to fall, they’d turned their attentions to other pursuits, riding out into the prairie to rustle cattle and keeping them corralled in the canyon for a week or two while a drunken horse doctor from Saskatchewan used a hot iron to change the brands.
But this was not his canyon.
He could see that clearly.
This canyon had belonged to someone else, and they had come and gone some time ago, leaving behind the things they’d used, or broken and made useless. They lay strewn across the ground outside the entrance to the cave, half-buried in the dirt, skeletons in a mercantile graveyard. Here a rusted can. There a shattered lantern. A circle of stones arranged into a fire pit. A boot with no sole. A belt buckle. An empty wooden crate with the word “explosives” stenciled across it.
The cave had once been a silver mine. And from the looks of it, little more than an impressive failure, a dark tunnel bored and blasted into the rock and shored up with roughly hewn beams of thick timber. Gordon wasn’t sure how deep it went, but he’d have wagered ten dollars that no man had been here in a decade or more. It belonged to the rats now, and they’d scattered their fetid droppings everywhere. But until they found a way out of the canyon, it would have to serve as shelter.
As the low afternoon sun cast long shadows, they built a fire, setting it far back from the mouth of the cave to hide its light from the canyon walls above. Soon, the evening grew cold and they huddled close to the flames to ward off the growing chill, the rich scent of mesquite smoke cutting through the foul air. In the distance, the steady slosh of the river seemed to become quieter, its sound replaced by the steadier crackling of the burning branches and, more faintly, the scurrying of rats in the darker depths.
Gordon sat silently, listening to the men as they spoke of how they might leave this place, planning, musing, proposing hypotheticals. But only Sam and Bill gave it much attention, somehow finding a way to turn it into another argument, placing blame on each other for their current predicament. Jimmy Jones sat shivering with his knees pulled up to his chest, paying little attention to rest of them, denying himself the room they’d given him to move closer to the fire. Sitting further away, Frank seemed content to rest his broad shoulders against the wall of rock and sip a brown bottle of Laudanum.
Despite his desire to remedy the situation and have a constructive discussion about their plans, Gordon’s heart wasn’t in it. He was too tired, too weighed down by the thought of what had happened to Tom. Every time he brought himself to the verge of speaking, his mind turned to the fall, the feeling of the ground disappearing beneath him, being swallowed by the dust and smothered.
After a time, Jimmy let out a small cry and pressed the fingers of his good hand into his cheeks. He stared at Frank, watching the bottle glitter in the firelight.
“Let me have some of that.”
Frank eased the bottle from his lips. “Only got the one. And it came from my saddlebags.”
Jimmy’s face contorted in desperation. “Come on, Frank. Just let me have a little. My arm is broke for God’s sake.”
Frank looked at him, impassive. “And my ribs are broke. I’m not inclined to share.” He took in the others sitting around the fire, judging, resenting, scorning them. “And if any of you try to take it, I’ll bust your heads.”
Jimmy lowered his eyes, trembling.
Gordon turned to look at the big man sitting behind him. “Let the kid have some, Frank. He’s smaller than you. He doesn’t need much.”
Bill laughed, tossing a stick into the fire. “Old Frank needs more than you think. He’s the only man I’ve seen drink patent medicine the way some men drink whiskey.”
Frank lifted the bottle and took another sip. “This is better than whiskey.”
“And it’s precisely what the kid needs right now,” Gordon said.
Frank gritted his teeth. “I said –”
“And now I’m saying. Give it to him.”
An unspoken threat passed between them. Gordon had known Frank a long time. He knew what Frank could do to him, just as he knew that Frank would never actually do it.
Frank glared, seething with bitterness, and then conceded with a nod. He stood up and handed the bottle to Jimmy. The kid sipped slowly and let the opium still his suffering.
Gordon turned to the fire, watching until it burned low and sleep overtook him.
Morning brought warmth and pain.
Gordon could feel it everywhere. In his head. In his chest. In every joint and limb. It throbbed and stabbed, punishing him with each guarded movement. It wasn’t until he stood and stretched and ran his fingers over the tense muscles that he was able to convince himself nothing was broken.
The pain was there, and it wasn’t.
Perhaps it was another kind of pain.
In his mind, or in his soul.
The others awoke and grumbled, stricken with real injuries. Frank was opium-dazed and off-balance, walking around in circles in search of his boots. When he found them, he grunted in disgust and tossed them back into the dirt, sending something small scurrying out of the collar on multiple legs.
“Goddamn, scorpions!” he said. “May they perish from the Earth.”
“Maybe they just like you,” Bill said, grinning.
“Maybe you should shut your mouth and see about making us some breakfast.”
Gordon fed twigs to the smoldering ashes of the fire and brought it back to life, filling the already warm cave with an almost unbearable heat. They cooked salt pork and beans, and ate eagerly. All of them except for Jimmy. He lied curled up, beside the fire, his eyes wide open, unseeing. They tried to rouse him, but he was somewhere else, caught between consciousness and sleep.
After they finished eating, Sam limped to the mouth of the cave and stepped into the soft morning light. Gordon followed him to the water’s edge.
Minutes passed, and neither of them spoke. For the first time, they truly noticed it. There was beauty in this place, a quiet perfection they had long ago forgotten how to see. Before now it had seemed as if there had never been time. Time was money. Time was work. Time was days hunched over ledgers in musty offices, or digging fence posts while the foreman cursed and demanded expedience, or scheming up ways to make a living that didn’t involve bosses. Time was nights shivering in tents in railroad camps, or sweating at the poker tables in search of good fortune, or lying beside a woman who could offer warmth but couldn’t calm the doubt and the fear and the voices that questioned the things that were supposed to be certain.
Gordon felt it all around him, the harmony of a world barely blemished by man, all things existing in balance.
But as he looked at his feet, the illusion was broken.
There he saw a keg of kerosene, slowly rotting and leaching its oil into the water, forming a swirling multi-colored film across the
surface.
A thought occurred to him then, and he spoke it: “Are we bad men?”
Sam shuffled in the sand, turning to face him. “What makes you say that?”
Gordon lifted his shoulders, as if it was an answer, and then added: “It’s something I think about from time to time.”
“Maybe you think too much.”
“I might.”
They fell into silence again. A minute slipped past.
Sam spoke, his voice full of indignation: “We’re not badder than anyone else. No…we’re…we’re not even that bad. We’re only doing what we have to do, aren’t we?”
“I suppose we are.”
“And we’ve never killed anyone in the pursuit of that. Not in the pursuit of scratching out a profitable vocation. I killed men during the war, sure. But that was war. War is different.”
“I know that. I mean, that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know it the way you know it.”
Sam stared out across the river, his eyes becoming far away. “You’d be surprised what you can live with. And the things you can’t, you change. And believe me, a man can change. When the war ended, I told myself I had to. I told myself I was done with killing, and I’ve stood by that.
“I know you were too young to fight, Gordon. So, you don’t know what it was like. What it was like after. When it was over, I was so full of hate I thought it would destroy me. I wanted to kill. I needed to. Everywhere I looked, I found someone deserving. I found a reason to do it.
“My daddy had himself a farm in Sullivan County. Small place. Sixty acres. But you should have seen it. It was like Heaven on Earth to me. He worked that land for twenty years. Tilled the soil with own two hands. Sweated over it day after day.
“Then the bank came and told him he needed to pay up. And he didn’t have the money. He couldn’t get a line of credit. Couldn’t rightly borrow it either when everyone else was trying to put the pieces together. The war had up-ended everything.
“He held out as long as he could, but it didn’t make any difference. This…Carpetbagger….from Boston came along and bought the farm direct from the bank. He just showed up at my daddy’s door one day with the signed papers and told him to get out. Didn’t give a damn that he had nowhere to go. He wanted him out right then and there, or he’d have him locked up for trespassing on private property.
“Can you believe that? A man works half his life at something, and has it taken away like it’s nothing.
“When I heard what happened, I knew what I had to do. I knew that I was gonna find that Carpetbagger. And I was gonna kill him. Even if I’d hang for it.
“But the day arrived when I meant to do it, and something came over me. There was this aching in my guts. I felt sick. I thought about killing him, and the more I thought about killing him, the sicker I felt.
“It was like a poison flowing through me.
“I wanted to kill him, and I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill anyone ever again.
“And every day, I remind myself of that. I tell myself that I’ve atoned and changed. I’m not like some of those folks who make the papers. You’re not like that either. I wouldn’t even carry a gun if it wasn’t an occupational hazard. But other things we do…that doesn’t hurt anyone. Not really.”
Gordon touched the holster at his hip, allowing his fingers to brush the steel of the pistol there. “We just scare people a little.”
“That’s right. We play the role of the badder men because that’s what gets the result we need. You saw how it was with that stage. The driver believed we were prepared to kill. And sometimes belief is stronger than anything. It doesn’t matter if you fire a shot or not. If a man believes the shot will come, he’ll cower and do things he wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. And he sure as shit will hand over the money, or anything else you care to take from him.”
“But the things we take…people always want them back.”
Sam leaned against a tree and lifted his foot to stretch the bad ankle. “You still think they’re coming after us?”
“I don’t know. They were awfully eager yesterday.”
“They were that. Maybe we got lucky though. If you can call it luck. Maybe that fella we saw up there didn’t see us, and they figure we died in the fall. Maybe he’s gone by now.”
“Maybe. But maybe he’s still up there. And I don’t think we should decide anything until we know for sure. If we have to, we could stay down here for a few days, stretch out the food we’ve got. Stay out of sight and see if they’re willing to come down and get us.”
“I can get behind that mule. Doesn’t mean it’ll plow for Frank or Bill though.”
“You let me talk to Frank. I can reason with him. And steer clear of Bill. You two are a bad pair.”
Sam cracked half-a-smile. “Now, Gordon, you know I’m a civilized man at heart. While Bill and I have had our…differences of opinion…I’m amenable to the idea of peaceful coexistence. Of course, when I was a younger man, I would have gladly stuck a bayonet through his Yankee hide, but he’d have done the same to me, so all’s fair.”
Gordon laughed, and looked out across the river toward the far end of the canyon. The morning sun was beginning to burn brightly along the top of the red rock. Despite the growing warmth, it would be a few hours before it washed over the canyon floor. It wouldn’t reach the cave until at least midday.
A thought came to him then, fully formed and already on his lips before he gave it any more consideration.
“Do you still have that pair of field glasses?”
“Yeah. In my saddlebags. But they got smashed up in the fall.”
“How bad?”
“Didn’t take much time to look, why?”
“I need them. Get Frank, too. Tell him to bring his rifle.”
He couldn’t see, but he was confident that he couldn’t be seen either.
Gordon sat in the shaded bow of a mesquite tree with Sam’s field glasses in his hands. They were exactly as Sam had said – smashed – but not entirely useless either. One barrel had been crushed and flattened, the lens completely destroyed. The other was merely cracked.
He placed it to his eye and carefully adjusted the focus. He saw the damaged glass, blurred and amorphous, growing brighter and then darker as he slowly panned from left to right. He stopped to wipe the lens with his shirt, and tried again.
“Can you see anything?” Sam asked, his voice hushed to a whisper.
“Not yet.”
Frank shuffled his feet impatiently. “I don’t see why we’re wasting the day on this.”
“Just wait,” Gordon said.
He aimed the field glasses at a narrow gap in the leaves and squinted. The image was still a mess, too abstract to be recognized. He slowly adjusted the focus, took a moment to judge the increase or decrease in clarity, and then adjusted some more.
Slowly, the blur took on shape, the non-color deepening to red and brown and orange.
He saw the canyon wall, pocked with fissures and crevices, ribbed with folds like the skin on the back of an old train conductor’s neck. He tilted upward, passing over jagged ledges and crags. There were shrubs and saplings growing on narrow overhangs, defying wind and gravity. Further up he saw a tree, a gnarled pine with its feeble roots knotted over the rocky mantle, its twisted branches out-stretched in contrition.
He saw the man sitting in it.
He was little more than a dark silhouette, barely large enough to fill the eyepiece. He sat on a branch, riding it the way a man would ride a horse. His arms held something, ill-defined and long. The field glasses were too damaged to make it out clearly. But he knew it was a rifle.
Gordon handed the field glasses to Sam and climbed down.
“He’s still there.”
“Alone?” Sam asked.
“Looks that way.”
Frank stepped closer to the tree and looked up through the branches at the distant wall of the canyon. “The rest of them could be campe
d out up top. Maybe even provisioned for a week or more. One thing’s for sure, he’s got a view of the whole canyon from up there.”
“But he has to know where to look,” Sam said. “What’s to say we can’t sneak out after dark? He’d need eyes like an owl to see us then.”
“Or ten other sets of eyes with pairs of glasses up at the top of that cliff helping him out. Which he may have. But as to the matter of walking out, that would depend on there being a way out.”
“There’s a river right there. River’s don’t go nowhere, stupid.”
“And last I heard, a man can’t walk on water unless his name is Jesus Christ. Let’s say the other end of this canyon narrows to ten feet with rock all the way up and fast-moving water below. You know how to swim, Sam?”
“Yes, I know how to swim, Frank. And we don’t know what’s at the other end of this canyon. So, why don’t you postpone your bleak assumptions for the time being?”
Frank spit into the dirt. “I could do that.”
“Situation is, he’s up there, we’re down here. And we all know why that is.”
“Why is that?” Frank asked. “Because we had the dumb luck of getting caught in a rockslide? Or because we were dumb enough to trust Charvet when he said taking that parcel would be an easy job?”
Sam thought about it for a moment. “Both I guess. But Charvet never did wrong by us before.”
“There’s always a first time.”
Sam leaned closer, looking worried. “You think he…turned us in?”
Frank shook his head and nodded up toward the cliff. “That fella up there? He’s like…rain in the middle of the dry season. There’s no good reason why you should think it’ll rain. But sometimes it just does. Without warning. Without any prior indication. I think Charvet is the sort who would write for the Farmer’s Almanac. I think maybe he believes he’s got a keen sense of these things. It didn’t rain in July for ten years in a row. So he’s confident that come July next year, it won’t rain either. Then July rolls around, and it pours. We’re just the poor saps who happened to get caught in it.”