by Dyer Wilk
As Gordon came within sight of the lightning-struck tree, he heard the first shot. His eyes searched, moving from trunk to trunk until he found Frank standing with the rifle to his shoulder, aiming up at the cliff.
He chambered another round within a second and fired again, not bothering to steady himself. Gordon ran, unable to cross the ground fast enough to stop a third shot and then a fourth.
Frank was screaming, sending every foul word he knew to the top of the canyon, and punctuating it with a bullet.
As Gordon reached him, Frank swung around, aiming the smoking rifle barrel directly at his face.
“Stop,” he said. “Please.”
Frank gritted his teeth. “I’ve got him scared now.”
Gordon felt the panic clawing at his chest.
“Don’t you understand what you’ve just done?”
Gordon moved faster than he thought possible, running through the grove with Frank lumbering behind, having only half-understood the things he tried to tell him.
When they reached the cave, Gordon quickly gathered every bit of firewood he could find along the shore, piling it into Frank’s arms and ordering him to bring it inside.
There was little time, but Gordon wasn’t sure how much exactly. If he was right, it could happen any minute now. And if they weren’t prepared, they were both dead men.
He tossed the branches on the fire, building it up so high that the flames nearly reached the ceiling.
Frank moved slowly, obeying his commands without questioning them, carrying Sam’s saddlebags and the rifle into the dark, until they were forty feet from the flames.
When Gordon was satisfied that the fire would burn for a long while without needing more wood tossed on, he ran into deeper into and dropped onto his stomach behind a saddlebag, using it to prop up Frank’s rifle.
Frank sat behind him, leaning on an elbow.
They waited.
Gordon wasn’t certain what he expected.
One man or ten.
But he knew they were coming, and the shots were the last straw. They’d scale the cliff and cross the river and come for them, or maybe they truly were what he’d seen in his nightmares and they’d rise out of the darkness.
Maybe they’d known where to look all along.
And soon they would step through the mouth of the cave, the silver light of the full moon framing their tall silhouettes, their bodies remaining little more than walking shadows as they approached the fire, the glare of it dimly illuminating their featureless faces.
Time stretched, playing tricks. A minute was an hour. An hour was a day.
Gordon gripped the rifle tightly in his hands until his fingers ached. He stared down the sight and focused on the rising conflagration, prepared to shoot whoever stood behind it.
“I’m real sorry,” Frank whispered. “I don’t know what got into me.”
“Don’t talk.”
“It’ll be all right. I might have got him. He might not come after us.”
“Frank, it’s fine. Just keep your voice down.”
Frank shivered, and lifted the bottle, pouring the last of it down his throat. In the dark, his dope-sick eyes were nearly black, completely lost.
“But even if he does, we can outsmart him. He thinks he’s got us trapped, but he doesn’t.”
“Frank, we are trapped.”
Frank shook his head, and crawled backwards a couple feet, waving his hand toward the far end of the tunnel.
“Don’t you see, Gordon? The way out has always been down. We can go deeper. Deeper than any other man has ever gone. We can live inside the Earth, Gordon. You and me and the rats. We’ll fool them all. We can stay down here forever. It’ll be like in those fairy tales. Trolls and goblins. We’ll rule them like Kings. They’ll treat us like Gods. We don’t need daylight. We don’t need the sun.”
“Shut up! Shut you goddamn stoned mouth, Frank! Or I’ll oblige you and bury you down here.”
Frank stared at him, confused and oblivious, but he didn’t say a word.
Gordon turned his attention back to the rifle and the mouth of the cave beyond, trying to block out everything else, including his own thoughts and the monstrous fear that stoked the fires of his locomotive heart.
He was only a man and the thing of his nightmares was also a man.
A bullet could put an end to him.
One shot and it could all be over.
He waited, dedicated to the task as the hours passed.
But no one showed.
Somehow the sun still rose.
Gordon lifted himself up from the hard ground, breathing the thin smoke from the smoldering fire, and walking to the mouth of the cave to watch the sky brighten. Behind him, Frank stirred, rolling over and coughing as he threw a thick arm over his eyes, muttering a curse at the encroaching daylight.
He was lucky to have slept at all. Gordon would have happily traded places with him for a few hours of peaceful oblivion.
The urge to step back into darkness and rest was almost unbearable, but he willed himself to stay on his feet, driven by a fathomless determination.
He would see this through.
He would find a way out.
He paced back and forth in the mouth of the cave, waiting for Frank to rouse himself, his hand occasionally dropping to the ironwood grip of the pistol firmly secured in the well-oiled holster at his hip. Until now, he’d had little cause to use it. It was akin to a prop in a stage production. Something to intimidate coach drivers and night watchmen. Loaded only because there was always a slight chance that he might have to fire it.
All these years, he hadn’t been prepared for that. Every job. Every detestable act of robbery. He had known that if things went sideways and descended into violence, he wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger.
But he was prepared now.
He had been prepared last night. Thought last night he had been afraid. Today, it would be different. Today, he would show no fear. Instead, he would give in to the forbidding spirit he had spent years trying to avoid, the red animal that drove men to run across open fields of battle, rage-filled and hungry for each other’s blood.
Gordon paced and imagined and impelled his mind onward, and then his eyes fell to the cave floor, moving over the lifeless bodies of Sam and Bill.
He felt his knees go soft, all that strength faltering as he reached out to brace himself against the wall.
Frank coughed again and dragged his feet through the dirt, kicking the empty bottle of Laudanum and sending it clattering against the rocks.
“Goddamn it. Shit.”
Gordon walked deeper into the cave. “I take it you’re awake then.”
“Yeah, I’m awake.”
“Are you sober?”
“Wish I wasn’t.”
“Do you remember last night?”
“Wish I didn’t.”
“I think we should bury Sam and Bill before it gets too hot. Then we should check on those traps and fill our canteens. And when the sun goes down, I think we should climb up that cliff and kill that son of a bitch.”
Frank got to his feet, looking surprised and hopeful. “Man alive. When we get back to Branchwater, I’m buying you a drink.”
Gordon felt an abrupt flutter of longing, spurred by Frank’s optimism. He could see Branchwater on a Friday night, the smoky streets crowded with copper miners eager to spend their wages, pushing rudely past lamplighters dressed in unseasonable wool coats, hurrying to the nearest whorehouse or saloon, laughing, fighting, drinking themselves broke. He’d always felt out of place there, a sheep among wolves. An imposter who nursed a single drink for an hour and laughed at jokes he didn’t care for only to avoid embarrassment. But he would have given almost anything to be there again, to sit in the musty rooms that reeked of tobacco-spit, waiting for Charvet to walk through the door and greet him in broken English tinged with Cajun French.
Frank walked toward the mouth of the
cave, upbeat and very much awake. He talked of old times, taking care not to mention Bill or Sam or Tom or Jimmy. He mused about plans and money and woman and cards. The hell of the last several days was pushed aside, as if it had never even happened. They would return home and it would be the same as it had always been. Better than that even.
He walked around the smoldering fire, looking for his boots, and then stooped to put them on, laughing at a joke that Gordon only half-understood.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me see a smile on that face. First time all week, I’m feeling lucky.”
He continued to laugh, straightening his legs out one at a time, his back cracking audibly. He slid a foot into the first boot and pulled it up to his shin.
The laughter stopped, replaced by a wordless shriek that sounded like a hiss of hot steam.
“Ssssssssonofabitch!”
He wrenched his foot out of the boot and tossed it away, his eyes widening as a half-crushed scorpion tumbled out, a single glistening drop of venom beading at the tip of its twitching stinger.
Frank rocked back and forth, clutching the foot in both hands and tearing off the sock to reveal a red puncture mark on the arch.
He looked up at Gordon, flashing a thin smile. “Guess I spoke too soon. This hurts something fierce.” He grimaced, trying to laugh through the pain. “Guess I’m gonna be climbing on a sore foot. Do me a favor and step on that little shit.”
Gordon lifted his boot to oblige, but he could already see that the scorpion was dead. Its movements were pure reflex.
He kicked it into the ashes of the fire and crouched to look at Frank’s wound. The skin around the puncture mark was turning pink, beginning to swell, and pushing out a slowly creeping runnel of blood.
Frank shook his head. “God…damn…that hurts. Still…could be worse. Could’ve been…a rattlesnake. I hate…snakes.”
He gritted his teeth against the pain, breathing deeply. The air made a sharp whistling sound in his throat, as if it was being sucked through a narrow reed.
Frank pounded a fist against his chest and tried to cough.
“Shit…I should’ve saved some…of that…bottle.”
The foot slipped out of his grasp and flopped to the ground. He looked at Gordon, his eyes filled with worry now.
“Frank?”
Gordon touched his arm and felt his racing pulse beneath the skin. Frank pulled away, but the movement was sluggish. He started scratching at his neck.
“I’m all right. I’ve just got this…itch.” He feigned a smile. “Haven’t said that since I bedded the wrong whore.”
He tried to laugh, but it was dead air in his throat. His eyes bulged with panic. His mouth opened, as if to speak, but he was completely silent for several seconds, the fear growing, until his chest finally rose and he sucked in a gulp of wind with a sharp wheeze.
He managed to get out a couple words, but Gordon couldn’t tell if they were “oh, Jesus” or “no, please.”
Frank stopped scratching, his arms unspooling beside him as he fell back into the dirt. He looked up at the ceiling, his large body ticking with small movements, a quivering lip, a spasming finger, eyes flitting from side to side.
Gordon leaned over him, his own heart pounding. He spoke in frantic bursts of energy, making empty reassurances, his hands moving tentatively over the clammy skin as it turned pale. The breaths became fewer and farther between, growing more shallow until they stopped altogether. The eyes moved back and forth, slowing down. The pale skin turned blue. Gordon held a canteen to his lips and watched as the water pooled in his open mouth and spilled over his cheeks. He made promises of returning to Branchwater and buying him a drink and a clean woman, of reliving the good times that had never been that good. The eyes looked past him, moving only slightly, seeing the cave, and then rolling back, seeing nothing.
Gordon decided he was damned.
As the day wore on, he couldn’t get the thought of it out of his head. No matter how hard he tried, it was always there, a fact as indisputable as the sun always rising and always setting. It was there with him as he sat in the shadows and prayed to a God he had never really believed in. It was there as he lied prone on the shore and dipped his face beneath the water, trying to banish the heat from his aching head, and considering for a moment the idea of keeping it there and letting the river fill his lungs. It was there as he buried Frank and Bill and Sam.
He looked back on thirty years of life and knew he had brought this on himself.
It had begun long ago, before he’d even traveled west to the territory; before he’d quit college and (in the words of his father) “thrown his life away;” before he had reached a curious age and taken to standing in front of the windows of tailors’ shops on that busy Ohio street back home, admiring the smartly-dressed young men inside when all his friends were gawking at socialites in satin gowns; before he’d even left the womb, perhaps, when the nature of his soul was still being written by an unseen hand.
His entire life and every moment in it was marked by damnation, and in every corner of his mind that he searched he couldn’t find a single memory that wasn’t tainted. Even that perfect summer, when he and Tom had left their studies behind and run off to make their fortune. That summer had changed them. That summer and all its promise had only led him to years of loneliness.
All the things he’d said and felt in that other canyon, his canyon, had meant nothing.
Tom had gone away.
And when Tom had returned, things were different. Even when they were in the same room, standing face to face, there had been an immeasurable distance between them.
Gordon had resented it and told himself there was no resentment. He had looked for ways to keep Tom from going back home. He had hatched plans and looked to Charvet for jobs, always with the promise that it would lead to something better. Every job would be the last. Every job would earn them enough to quit and retire. He had lied to him, knowing there would always be another, that the payday wouldn’t amount to much. He lied because the lie gave him hope. Another week. Another month. One more year. To wait it out on the slim chance that Tom would change somehow and become his old self again.
He knew it had been wrong. He felt little remorse for the crimes he’d committed and the things he’d stolen, but it was the lies he’d told that made him feel guilty. His conscience remained clean for almost every misdeed, but he couldn’t forgive himself for deceiving a friend.
He had led Tom astray and poisoned him with the same vile curse that had haunted Gordon his entire life.
The curse of wanting what he couldn’t have.
The curse that drove men to fateful ends.
And so many of them had been ended. The memories of them tormented him, countless moments, going back to the day his life had first intersected with theirs.
Frank in some backroom in Tucson, pummeling bare-knuckle fighters in an illicit boxing ring.
Bill in a barbershop south of Prescott, working as an unlicensed doctor, patching up bank robbers.
Sam in a stockyard, stealing cattle and doctoring the records to show they’d been slaughtered.
Jimmy in a saloon, waiting for the piano player to visit the outhouse and then sitting down, pounding out a barn-burning rendition of “Oh! Susanna,” and pinching the tip jar when he finished.
And Tom.
Tom walking across the university quadrangle twelve years ago, wrapped up in a heavy overcoat even though it was early autumn and still quite warm, a furtive glance, a smile that hid entire worlds.
He’d have gladly tossed all the other memories into the fires of hell if he could only keep that one. He accepted that he was beyond redemption, but he wanted that moment to remain pure, to be a light in all this darkness.
But as the sun set, he knew there was nothing, no part of him that could be saved from the curse. The poison was everywhere and everywhere he went the poison would spread.
So be it.
He walke
d into the grove for the final time and pulled the weathered keg of kerosene out of the dirt. He carried it west, straining against the weight of it, and found the stump of the lightning struck tree.
As he spilled the oil over the ground, he thought of Sunday school, the words of the preacher warning him of burning lakes in the infernal regions below. He didn’t think he could manage something on that scale, but even after years of slowly seeping into the river, the keg was nearly full, and he didn’t spare a single tree trunk for a hundred yards. When it was empty, he breathed deep of the sharp fumes, savoring the moment, and took a box of matches from his pocket.
Gordon struck one and held it between his fingers, looking into its flame.
It was such a small thing.
And yet it would do so much.
He tossed it into the kerosene and watched the blue flames spread low over the ground, turning the dead leaves and grass to glowing embers, coiling around the roots of oaks and cottonwoods in orange snakes, climbing upward rapidly into the treetops, jumping from branch to branch until the entire grove was a burning umbrella.
He walked through the smoky air, past the cave, toward the falls. Just below the rapids, he found a place where the slick rocks were close enough together for a man to walk across.
The other side of the river was nearly identical, but here the slopes below the cliff crept closer to the water, rising in chalky knees and shoulders that divided the woodland into isolated thickets. As he walked, he stayed near the shore where the trees grew uninterrupted, bathed in the sickly blood-red light from the fire on the other side.
He searched, keeping his eyes trained upward. When he was certain he’d found the right spot, he walked toward the base of the cliff. As he neared it, he saw that it had no defined beginning. The slopes were dotted with boulders and outcroppings, places where the dirt had been eroded away to reveal the rock beneath, gradually becoming steeper until there was more rock than dirt and the trees and scrub brush disappeared completely.