Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  “Yes,” said Marshall, “muffins of the lowest caliber.”

  “Indeed, and I fear even more that a sociologist will get ahold of it. Then my ideas will cretinize in the news magazines. I’d have to go to some place where they don’t have Time or Newsweek.”

  “Doesn’t exist,” said Marshall.

  In the days they watched eagles glide, and at night they lay facing a raft of stars. Sometimes they turned on the SLS for the silent band concert. The green streetcar always rolled up in the darkness and the women looked happily at the concert. But as Marshall and Nancy became better observers, they realized that the expressions of those women were very sad as well, as if they were longing for the unyielding past. One night, they had been observing life in Santa Fe, when the streetcar came around the bend and did not stop. The women inside were tearful. Nancy began to cry, and Marshall held her, his shoulders spotted with hot tears. He didn’t know exactly what was happening, but she said, “I have a confession to make. I’m not from Kentucky. We didn’t have a ranch or a breeding farm. I never rode horses until I came to Pinnacle, and then Denis had to teach me.” She looked sad and burdened, as if she had done him a great disservice in creating the myth of a Kentucky girlhood.

  “We grew up in Chicago, near the elevated line. It was a Polish neighborhood. I even know some Polish. Daddy worked at Swift. The most I remember about nature is looking at the orange sky beyond green trestles. I thought that it was a fire from a purer place. I thought that if I could fly, I could get there. That’s how I came to love birds. In summer, we used to sit outside the door, in the heat, and watch the streetcars go by. They were green, just like the one in Santa Fe. Is it wrong to cry when I think of how little I knew, how much I loved, how much simple things meant? I remember that little girl, in clothes that were always too heavy and never fit. I was so hopeful. I didn’t really know who I was or where I was. And yet, those times seem to be the center of the world, the root of everything. Am I wrong? Am I wrong to love the little girl that I see in a sweet, tortuous, slow-moving vision of the past,” she got her breath, “in Chicago, in the summer, far away from eagles or anything like them? We were very poor. Am I wrong?”

  “No,” said Marshall. “No. You’re not wrong at all, not at all.” He held her so tightly that she had trouble breathing, but she loved it, and pulled him to her even harder. The little girl who was, who would never be again, came in front of their eyes. And there they were, way on top of a high rock chimney, breathing heavily because a vision of Chicago had leaped out of time and taken hold of their hearts as suddenly as if an eagle had fallen from above and gripped them in its talons.

  11

  IN THE last nights they waited for the wave of Chicago to come rumbling in as if a commuter train with tracks on air left the city each day and raced across the plains to Nancy Baker, whose eyes clouded as she was subsumed in a mist of the past. Sometimes it was pleasant. Once, they found themselves on a wood porch overlooking a hot street. It was so quiet that they heard the faucets in a neighbor’s house, and the grinding of streetcar wheels many blocks away. A potted palm sat in the corner, its fronds pressed up against white rails. Where was that palm? And where was the heat, and the glances? Where had they gone? It was painful to discover that she would not see these things again, more painful when she saw them in their true colors billowing out of the air, and still more painful when somehow other people’s memories and sadnesses were spliced in. Why did these things return so surely and strongly?

  Marshall said that it was because the stars were so bright. “You see, we’re lying here and all time is passing through us, echoes of light from the past and the future as well. The whole thing,” he said, moving his hand to indicate the sky, “is a vast complex of webs and lances. The lances are like needles, and they thread the past after them. Wherever you are, you are completely hemmed in with events that have happened and events that will happen. It’s like being submerged in water. You can’t see it, but you’re pressured from all sides. Air, too, is like that—you feel it only if there is a breeze. We are trapped in this molten crystal, and sometimes the surge of waves allows us to sense a chain of events. Sometimes, you can even lean into it and not fall. It is communicated and revealed by light. You need not see it, but you have to be in it. I’ll prove it. If you want the waves of Chicago to cease their pounding, come sit in the storage room and we can discuss practical matters divorced from memories. And you’ll see that, away from the light, the past recedes.”

  In the rock chamber they felt as if they had gone behind a waterfall after passing right through it. Nancy threw her hair back and stared into the darkness, knowing that a cascade of light and time beat against the rock as busily as a heavy rain. It came from all angles and struck rhythmically, arhythmically, with surprise, insistence, and humor. They could have been in a cave of Spain, in cool white rock, while all around the lightshower chattered like clucking animals, castanets, plucked strings. In quiet places where the stars shone or the sea rose, the lightshower was always strong. She looked at the black wall, where a line of booted cavalry in white galloped over a ragged hillside while, beyond, a plain covered with red flowers appeared telescopic and grainy. The cavalry rushed along in searing colors. “I thought we were to speak of practical matters,” she said, as dust flew from behind the horses and sabres and metal equipment danced about and jangled.

  “Just a second,” Marshall replied. “It will undoubtedly fade. Must have been drawn in after us. They’re Mexican, late nineteenth century, wouldn’t you say?” She strained after the fading image.

  “It’s hard to tell, but they are South American. They have those flattish hats, and they’re dark in color.” When the image left, they discovered that they were exhausted. They went to the top level and threw themselves down on the mats. Their supplies had run out two days before, and they had been working on spirit, devotion, and lust. But they dared not descend the great ladder in too much of a trance, and had decided to leave the next morning. Marshall was pulled east, though he could not explain the attraction, for Nancy May Baker was certainly enough to keep him at Pinnacle forever. Within him was a pressing desire to confront his past, the way Nancy May Baker had begun to do. The period of observation was over.

  It was not easy to leave, but certain images arose to claim fealty, images mysterious and powerful, which he knew that he could no longer ignore. And one only moved to the West, and could not grow up there, whereas the East was real. The East was substantial, the West only a dream.

  But then there was Nancy—dark, quiet (though often quite voluble), and so beautiful in and out of her sex that she entranced. Her interest in the objective world brightened her beyond belief. She and her kind, scientists who followed a pure cord of sense, were destined to discover new dimensions, an order apart from and superior to the decadent mechanistic notions of the avant-garde. It would be, perhaps, a new faith, an iridescence in the bell of the universe. In pursuit of the absolute, in attention to things such as the flight of eagles, and in travel of great distances, new laws would become manifest. Legions of scientists worked throughout the world in enviable integrity and wholeness, charting the processes by which, someday, earth and its sucking gravity, a constraint (and balance) for the mind as well, would be escaped.

  In her study of raptors and eagles she had soared beyond fashion and trend to learn the inbent lessons of a million years within the cabinet of perfect nature. Others who had seen the strange and penetrating lights had left record in music and painting. It had been their way and the only means. And then the wave of exploration had transferred to the back of the mundane, and, by pure logic (they thought), astrophysicists broke upon the time sphere of musicians. It was a strange alliance—sunburnt young men and women in Africa and elsewhere giddy in the noonday heat, their seniors in laboratories of the West, and all the minors doing their part so that by the small steps of technological advance, a pure science was directed on its way as straight as a lance. Nancy did not know h
er role, but Marshall realized that were he to travel with her he would feel the enviable momentum of a priesthood in ascendancy.

  She was not only lovely, but tall, and the direction of her life was very important, touching as it did upon the outermost reach. The day that he left they hiked ten miles to a rail line and waited by the tracks for several hours, talking nervously. A freight rounded the bend; she stepped back because of the noise and vibration; Marshall started to run, and then jumped on. Nancy May Baker and the ethereal world of the Far West, traced above by warlike eagles, receded in the distance as he was carried to the solidity of the East.

  12

  HE ROLLED south into dotted desert flashing with the larcenous grins of gila monsters. The track bed was nearly gone, necessitating a pace slow enough to permit hopping on and off for exercise and pleasure. Instead of panning to the east at the base of New Mexico, the train halted on a siding at a deserted crossing point near the border. In the bright light of a silver midnight, a triple-edged party of U.S. Border Patrol, Mexican Federals, and railroad bulls began to work down the long line of dusty cars, opening every door. At first, Marshall didn’t know what to do. He had no desire to travel into Mexico, and yet, to set off in the desert without water was not attractive either. Finally, he decided to go with the train, and he hid in the brush until they passed.

  The diesel started up in oily sparking convulsions, and Marshall headed into the Mexican desert in the deep of night. He could not believe that it was so brown and never-ending. For days the empty train beat south with hardly a stop. He ran out of food early on and there was no water anyway. Soon he was sallow and starved, with the complexion and demeanor of a hermit. The endless flats were most discouraging until, finally, he saw a palm. It looked as if it were dead from arthritis, but it was a palm. Then a few more appeared, and eventually he saw stagnant rivers and ragged fields bordered by uneven rows of banana trees. Marshall left the train for a minute to steal bananas, but the trees were stripped. Leaning out of the boxcar, he checked ahead for farmhouses. If one appeared in the distance, he jumped off the train and raced past the locomotive and its Mexican engineers (who seemed not to notice or care), until he came to the farmyard. With only two or three minutes to spare, he shot out the few words of Spanish he knew, trying to communicate his urgent need for food. “Frijoles! Tacos! Enchilada! Tortilla!” he screamed loudly, as if he were introducing himself to someone who could not hear. Faced with a breathless American waving his arms up and down, reciting a list of foods, and pointing to a handful of U.S. money, the farmers wife and her sweet smooth-faced nut-brown children were thrown into panic. The white-suited peon began his dash from nearby fields to confront the intruder, and only once out of a dozen times were food ready, the train slow enough, the peasants sharp enough, and a container present, so that Marshall got a substantial meal. He ate it with his fingers while his legs dangled over the dust and the steel wheels.

  Mountains framed the far distance with cool icy crests like a bird’s crowning plumage. The food was hot and it burned his mouth. He was full of grease and had not washed or brushed his teeth for days. He had no idea of where he was going; he realized that he had forfeited his degree and that all his friends were just then entering medical or law schools; he did not particularly like the way he smelled; and just a few hours after the chili and hot peppers, he began to feel his stomach catch fire. It was so hot even in September that sawdust in the boxcar began to smolder. He lay on the hard vibrating floor in great physical pain, staring at the mountains.

  He did not speak Spanish. He thought that he might come to a violent end or, what is worse, end up in a Mexican prison. But despite his seemingly horrendous position he was ecstatically happy and even whimsical. With nothing left and all opportunities missed, he was standing on pure nerves, and he felt lean, strong, and alive. He liked the rough growth of beard, which was quite different from times when he had simply forgotten to shave. He liked the dirt on his face and hands, his dusty gnarled boots, and the expression he imagined that he had—as open and clear as the mountain plateaus to the southwest, as if whatever he was had begun to come out after years of submersion in a life of supplements, adjuncts, opportunities, and provisions.

  He discovered that his arms were badly cut from charging through ranks of thorns and cactus in his sprints to beat the train each time he saw a farmhouse, but it was all right. The train slid eastward into a hot grainy landscape and at night he sweated and could not sleep, but it was all right. He held up his cut and infected arm and swept it across the brightness of the Milky Way, moving his fingers in a wave. He could feel the muscles in his fingers, his arm, and his side, and he moved his hand back and forth over the stars as if to music. It was not the first time that he had been electrified by a soundless shower of stars, infinitely distant and untouched. It was not the first time that love had arisen from nowhere and given him strength, sustenance, and peace. He was hungry but not hungry, hurt but untouched, tired but full of paced movement. There was a sweet smell of cane and mangoes, just as in Jamaica. Looking up at the stars from that southern track he remembered courage on the White Water, and all was clear. He was carried over rivers and through many miles of greenery toward Vera Cruz and the Gulf. Although he thought that he was low and tangling in his raw wits, it was just a practice run, and he had survived rather easily. After all, in Mexico, or anywhere else, the stars were always high and the heavens an inviolable, unconquerable blue.

  13

  WANDERING HALF-DEAD among the river-colored mud walls of Vera Cruz, Marshall wanted only to sleep on a bed of clean sheets. He found a hotel for a dollar a day, and checked in. He was given a steel locker for his bag, and led to a small room with French doors which opened on the plaza. It wasn’t a bad room, but there were eight beds in it jammed up one against the other. Marshall climbed over soldiers and whores to the center cot, where he pushed a bunch of rifles, whisky bottles, and pornography to the edge and lay down.

  He slept for twenty hours, his face resting on the barrel of a Belgian automatic rifle with an atrocious French accent. When he awoke it was dark, his jaws were sore, and a new and different set of soldiers had come in. Marshall left to wander through the decay and the wharves, where he found a shrimp boat headed for New Orleans. Despite rumors that the captain was notoriously storm-prone, Marshall paid him $100 for passage.

  Then he wandered back to the plaza and sat in a straw chair, drinking Japanese beer and listening to the marimbas and electric gourds. In a place like Vera Cruz, people always seem to be living their very last day. This was especially true concerning the prostitutes. As if they were suffering from advanced beriberi or kwashiorkor, they appeared obviously starved of love. It could be easily seen in their eyes. Even the hardest among them felt the tick of every second like a dull pain—deficiency of love, inner leprosy, a profession only for those with organs of porcelain, and the rest beware.

  He stayed in the plaza until dawn. Even near the wharf, the sea was blue, green, white, and loaded with glossy swells. Marshall went to his berth on the Louisa, and when he awoke they were in the center of the Gulf, with a burning sun, no birds, and whitecaps as crisp and foamy as sugar. They plowed across midsized swells, and gathered for a meal.

  Although 110 feet long and properly provided with bowel-like chugging and tugging machinery—winches, pinchers, grinders, obloons, balugas, concors, and glackpoven—their African Cape shrimp sloop was toylike in its roll and appearance. The shrouds were as tight as harp strings and the gleaming machinery was coated with special dirtless oil. Mounted amidships near the machines were recreation slats for gazing at the moon. A sailor put his head and neck in a slat and, as the ship rolled and pitched, his eyes danced like bouncing balls to follow the bright undulations of the moon, thus providing recreation. The crew was composed of Jamaicans, Mexicans, and Americans. Of course, the Jamaicans had familiar Jamaican-style names—Ambrose, Dexter, Wilson, Birdie, Evans, Harlan, and Sterling. The Mexican names were too long to rem
ember (and thus the Mexican crew was numbered from one to ten), and those of the Louisianans, if not as engaging as those of their island neighbors, were at least somewhat striking—Tough-mello, Pinckney, Starbuck, Crispin, Belchasseur, Close, and Duckworth. They paired up in strange conflagrations—Close and Crispin, Belchasseur and Pinckney, Starbuck and Duckworth.

  They were heading straight for New Orleans at full speed to disgorge a frozen cargo of Giant Gulf Shrimp. The holds were as icy as Greenland, and the sailors went about with rubber boots and shovels, adjusting the shrimp. So it was a leisurely voyage except for some routine shrimp shifting and machine cleaning. Everyone was happy, and when they gathered for Sunday dinner abaft they looked delightedly at a blue sea as smooth as oil and as rolling as West Texas grasslands. A steel barrel cut in half from top to bottom and laid sideways on metal legs held a bed of white coals. The cook was grilling shrimp as thick as a boxer's fist. Occasionally, he threw quartered Mexican lemons on the grid to sizzle with the shrimp and scallions. They had water biscuits, beer, and Vera Cruz mangoes, and they sat in a ring around the fire and took what they wanted. Marshall asked if there were any soy sauce. “Any what?” asked the cook.