by Dyer Wilk
Jimmy pulled away. “No…I don’t want to be a burden.”
“You’re not a burden, kid. You’re one of us. And we look after our own.”
“I still don’t want you treating me like a child. I’m a grown-up man. I can get my own water. I will get it.”
Jimmy got to his feet awkwardly, the sling around his broken arm causing it to stick out an odd angle like a broken wing.
“Are sure you’re okay?” Bill asked.
“I’m dandy.”
“Why don’t you let me get the water?”
“No. I’ll get it. I got one good arm.”
Jimmy walked toward the mouth of the cave, moving quickly. Bill trailed close behind.
“Don’t mother him,” Frank said.
Bill stood in the opening, half-bathed in moonlight, watching as the kid walked down to the shore and knelt at the water’s edge. “I’m just making sure he’s safe. That’s all.”
Frank walked over and clapped a hand on his shoulder, pulling him firmly until he took two steps back into the cave. “You can make sure he’s safe from in here, Bill. He wants to be a man, let him.”
“Hey, I’m letting him get it himself, aren’t I?”
“I can’t drink this,” Jimmy called out. “It’s got oil in it.”
“Hold on a second,” Bill said. “I’ll come give you a hand.”
Frank laughed. “So, you’re letting him get it himself then.”
“I’ll just show him where to get it. That’s all."
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Sam said, pushing himself up. “Enough of this dilly-dallying.” He limped to the mouth of the cave, and leaned against a beam to take the strain off his ankle. “Kid, just walk out a little ways. It’s fresh as well water. No mud or anything.”
“Are you sure?”
“You want me to get it? How about Bill? You got plenty of grown men ready to fetch it for you.”
“I’ll get it. Leave me alone.”
Frank shook his head, chuckling. “That boy is stubborn.”
“You’re a shade stubborn yourself,” Bill said.
“Yeah, but age has refined me into the gentleman you see before you.”
“What a bunch of horse shit.”
“You being a horse thief, you would know a lot about that.”
They all heard the scream.
Gordon saw it first, his heart shuddering as he looked beyond the fire and out of the cave, seeing Jimmy thrashing in the water a few yards from shore, being pulled away on the current.
He was on his feet and running within a second. By the time Bill and Frank turned and saw what he saw, he was nearly out of the cave. And then all four of them were hurrying outside together, skittering over dirt and rock toward the river. Bill moved out ahead, galloping into the water in a full sprint that quickly slowed to a jog as the river rose above his knees. He charged forward and the water climbed to his hips, to his waist, to his stomach. He battled against it, refusing to give up.
And then he stopped, realizing exactly where he was standing, the treetops ending and the sky opening up above him.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said. “Swim, kid! Swim!”
Jimmy was already fifty feet out, his head just above the water, his good arm flailing. He kicked and thrashed, barely keeping himself afloat. He cried out, begging for help, from them or perhaps from God Himself. His voice echoed off the distant rocks, becoming smaller, carrying broken prayers that distorted as the waves lapped over his face and replaced the air in his throat.
Frank ran through the grove, moving faster than any of them could hope to match, trying to keep pace with the kid and still failing. Gordon tried to follow, slowing as Bill struggled to reach the shore, half-swimming/half-running through the water. Gordon stepped closer to help him, reaching out a hand.
Bill yelled: “Don’t stop. Go get the kid.”
Gordon did as he was told, and Bill staggering up the embankment, his strength completely sapped. Sam limped toward him, finally catching up. They nearly collided, and Bill stumbled past him, shouting.
“Get the rope, goddamn it! It’s the only chance he’s got!”
Sam muttered an unheard reply and pivoted on his good ankle, running back toward the cave in uneven strides.
Bill hurried down the shore, trying in vain to reach the kid as the current pulled him away, shouting for him to swim even though he knew damn well that Jimmy couldn’t.
Gordon was closer now, but he could already see the water that far out was moving faster than a man could run, pulling the kid further and further away until his cries faded in the vastness of the canyon and his face became silhouetted in the distance. He saw the arm move back and forth, splashing, the dark head bobbing up and down, disappearing beneath the rushing sheet of silver and then coming up again, the panicked voice cutting in and out, over and over, until the head went under one last time and the voice fell silent.
When Bill returned to the cave, something about him had changed.
As he set himself down beside the fire, he didn’t say a word. He stared into the flames, his eyes lost, his body slumped and thin like a newborn foal.
The silence smothered them all, overtaking the sound of the water and the crackling of the fire.
Bill kept staring.
Staring.
In time, he looked up and blinked.
“Why didn’t you bring the rope?”
Sam lifted his head. “Bill, I’m sorry about Jimmy…”
Bill’s voice was flat: “The rope. Why didn’t you bring it?”
“I…I did. You were far down the shore by the time I could get it. And Jimmy…the water was too fast. You know that. We all saw it.”
Bill looked at him, through him, the light of the fire and pure hatred burning in his eyes. “You killed that boy.”
Sam’s mouth fell open, wordless for a moment as a lump in his throat moved. “What are you saying that for? I didn’t do a thing to him.”
“You told him to go walking in the water. You didn’t bring the rope.”
“Now hold on. You hold on. I told you, I did. I can’t much run with my ankle twisted, but I brought it fast as I could. And I can’t be blamed for the kid walking out too far. He was sick. You saw he wasn’t right. I offered to fill his canteen. He wanted to do it on his own.”
Bill’s lips pulled back from his teeth, sneering as he spoke: “It should have been you.”
Sam’s jaw clenched. “If you were so concerned with that boy, why didn’t you jump in and grab him then? You can swim.”
Bill hesitated, the anger conflicting with the undeniable truth that the rest of them knew.
“You know why,” he said. “You know why I couldn’t go out there.”
Sam frowned, looking disappointed. “And yet you blame me? You blame a cripple for being crippled, when you were but fifty feet from him. And all you had to do was swim to him and pull him ashore. Seems to me, if you had done that, he’d be sitting here right now, drying himself by the fire. Instead of dead.”
Bill’s eyes filled with tears. “I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t! You know he’s up there. He could’ve shot the kid if he wanted, and if I’d have swam further out, he could have shot me, too! We step out in the open and that’s how it’ll be. He’s got us all trapped and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it!”
Gordon put a hand on his shoulder.
He spoke softly. “That’s enough now. Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll try to find a way out of here.”
Bill wiped his eyes and nodded.
They all lied before the fire in an imitation of slumber, their heads cushioned by folded arms, their eyes closed. Gordon pretended like the rest of them, but sleep didn’t come. His mind wouldn’t cease thinking. He saw Jimmy in the water, thrashing and screaming. He saw Tom falling from his horse, a look in his eyes like he’d seen death carrying away everything he held dear.
The thoughts drifted into waking nightmares. He saw the c
anyon, but it was different somehow. Contorted forms that vaguely resembled men emerged from the shadows, as if they had been waiting there all along. They climbed down the cliffs and the trunks of the trees and crawled through the grove, their long arms reaching out with midnight claws, holding the darkness of a world beyond the known world. They converged on the cave, slithering inward, wrapping themselves around the fire and snuffing it out. Their forms changed then, the absence of light allowing them to become what they truly were. They expanded like fog and settled over their sleeping pray, allowing themselves to be breathed in.
Gordon opened his eyes with a start, hitting his head against the wall of the cave. He looked over and saw the fire still burning. He saw the men sleeping around it, or at least pretending to.
He sat up and rubbed his face, and then stood.
He couldn’t breathe in here.
He was boiling.
He walked out into the moonlight, and moved through the grove, stripping off his clothes and draping them from branches until he was completely naked, letting the night air cool him. He found the stump of the lightning-struck tree and sat down and looked through the small gaps in the leaves, up at the canyon wall and the pine rooted to the rocks near the top.
He wondered why.
Why some men lived and others died.
All these years, he hadn’t given it much thought. But he knew some men deserved to die more than others.
Tom Talbert was the least deserving man he’d ever known.
Tom had been good.
Even in the midst of their awful business, he had taken the gold watch out of his pocket from time to time. He had opened the cover to reveal the small portrait inside, and gazed at the woman who was waiting for him back in Chicago. Every time he had done it, Gordon had caught a look in his eye, one he had seen for a brief period ten years ago, but was now reserved for someone else. The look of a man in love.
Gordon gazed up at the distant tree and wondered if the man sitting in it felt anything at all.
In the hour before dawn, they walked the length of the canyon.
A strong wind had picked up, howling over the rocks and dropping downward, tugging at the branches in a steady wave of movement, rising and falling and then rising again. It was the first bit of luck they’d had in two days. The entire canyon floor was awake and writhing, the sight of it too much for one pair of eyes above (or even a dozen) to focus on.
They followed the river west, moving from tree to tree, running across the small patches of meadow where the grove was open to the charcoal sky.
It wasn’t a long walk. A mile at most. And when they reached the end, they saw what Frank had always known.
The walls narrowed, terminating in a slot less than ten feet wide. It forced the river into a bottleneck, roiling the water into a chaotic spray of foam that dragged roughly over the red sandstone. A man would have to be out of his mind to try swimming it. Even going with the current, he’d last a few seconds at most. And then time would stop with the breaking of his bones.
As the faint light of morning brightened in the eastern sky, they returned to the cave, defeated, walking as a funeral procession, in mourning for the ones they had lost among them, and the ones they were still yet to lose.
Day rose without ceremony, bringing heat and sweat and imprisonment once again. The food was gone. They starved quietly, basking in the shadows, taking care not to move more than they had to.
By mid-day, the madness was setting in, driving away all reason and replacing it with panicked fever. Sam cursed himself and stood and limped to his saddlebags, muttering about traps and snares, the tricks he’d learned as a boy back in Tennessee. He could catch a rabbit or a squirrel in the grove, or even one of the rats at the back of the cave. He could bait it with crumbs. It wouldn’t be much, but they’d be able to eat almost everything on the carcass, even the marrow in the bones.
Off he went into the shimmering air, becoming a near-mirage. When he returned an hour later, he was drenched in sweat and hunched over, his fingers blistered.
“Is he still there?” Gordon asked.
Sam’s voice was a dry croak: “I didn’t look.”
Deep down, Gordon knew he didn’t have to go and check.
But the urge was too strong to resist.
He needed to see for himself.
As he stood in the grove, looking through the field glasses, he saw exactly what he had imagined he’d see, what he’d dreamed about as he sat slumped over in the shadows, caught in a half-sleep.
The man was still there in his tree, mocking them with his patience.
Gordon hated him, wishing that by some miracle the rocks above would come tumbling down and crush him, knowing bitterly that it wouldn’t happen.
Day after day, the man would remain there. Waiting for them to perish.
They sat in their cave, willing night to come and give them some small fraction of comfort.
When the sun finally set, Sam went out to check the traps.
He looked sullen when he came back.
“Maybe you were you right,” Bill said. “Maybe we should eat one of those horses.”
“Who’s going out to get the meat?” Sam asked. “You?”
“Me and someone else. I’m not going alone.”
“I’ll do it,” Gordon said. “Let’s get this over with.”
“It’s not right,” Bill said, his voice becoming dangerously loud in the dark. “It can’t be.”
They stood at the base of the moonlit scree, walking parallel to the cliff, their eyes tracing the slope of broken rocks and finding nothing.
“It can’t be. It’s not possible.”
Gordon shushed him, dropping into a crouch and motioning for Bill to do the same. He pointed up at the scar cut into the rock high above them, his finger hovering over the gaping black mouth that had been a mere grin two days ago.
“Another rock slide,” he whispered. “It must have fallen away when the wind was up. The horses could be six feet down.”
Bill looked at the scar for a long time, needing to convince himself. “But why didn’t we hear it?”
Gordon shook his head. “I don’t know. The way the wind was howling? Someone could have taken a shot at us and we’d have never heard it.”
Bill’s eyes drifted over Gordon’s shoulder to the other side of the canyon, trying to find the tree.
“You think he’s watching us, don’t you?” Gordon said.
Bill nodded, his hands clenching and unclenching in front of him.
Gordon reached down and picked up and a jagged shard of rock, no larger than a silver dollar. He squeezed it in his hands until he felt pain, and then let it drop.
The fear was still there, but somehow it was different, almost comforting now, a kind of strength he could draw from. He wouldn’t run. He wouldn’t show weakness. He would sit and wait, regardless of the outcome.
“Maybe he is watching us,” he said. “Maybe he’s thinking it over carefully, deciding if he’s gonna pull that trigger. Maybe he doesn’t want us to go so easy. Maybe he wants us to starve instead.”
“We are gonna starve.”
“Not if we leave.”
“And how are we gonna do that, Gordon? You saw what we all saw. There’s no way out.”
“No way to walk out. So, if we can’t walk, we’ll climb. You, me, maybe Frank. I don’t know if Sam would be up to it with his ankle, but if he wants to try, we let him try. And if he doesn’t, we’ll still do what we can for him. We’ll go to Branchwater, get some fresh horses, and then come back for him.”
Bill looked down at his feet, using the toe of his boot to nudge the rock Gordon had dropped. “I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have been scrambling up that rock faster than any other man. But now…I feel so tired. After seeing Jimmy…I don’t know if I have anything left.”
Gordon reached out and gripped his shoulder. Bill looke
d up, surprised.
“Listen. I know it’s bad. Worse than that even. But if we don’t try to get out in the next day or two, I don’t think we ever will. You know I’m right. And you know you can make that climb if you have to.”
Bill sighed. “I suppose I could. Yeah. But what about…what about him?”
“I think he expects us to try. And if we tried climbing up right here, chances are we wouldn’t make it. He’d get a shot off before we could reach the top. So, we’ll climb up on the other side.”
“But how? If we try to cross that river we’ll –”
“It’s gotta be easier than we think. You saw how it was just a ways down from the falls. There are a lot of rocks, maybe enough for a man to get across. And once we’re across we go straight up under him. It’s the one place he won’t be looking. And when we get up there, you know what we have to do. We have to end him. If we don’t, it’ll be us. So, I’m asking you. Are you with me or not?”
A minute past as Bill considered it. Finally, he gestured an unenthusiastic “yes” with a single nod.
“We go tonight then.”
“What? Now?”
“Maybe an hour or two. Long enough to talk it out with the others and fill our canteens.”
Bill’s head dropped. He ran his hands over the back of his neck, trying to knead out the tension.
“I can’t do it. I can’t. Not tonight.”
“You can.”
Bill looked up, his face pale and withered in the harsh moonlight.
“I’ve barely slept a wink in two days. If I could just…just sleep one night. A little sleep. I can do it if I sleep.”
“Bill, if we wait another day, without food…”
“Sam will trap something. You’ll see. We won’t really starve. I didn’t mean it. We’ll be all right for another day. One more day to sleep and regain my strength.”
Gordon started to speak, ready to protest, and then hesitated.
He could see the exhaustion, the utter destruction that had befallen his friend in a matter of a few hours. It had eaten away at all of them in different ways, large and small, since they got here, but he understood now that Bill was the worst. For all his uninjured physicality, his mind was broken, the will to go on almost completely shattered.