The Drop Edge of Yonder

by Rudolph Wurlitzer

  At the end of the gangplank, Zebulon turned to offer a salute to Dorfheimer, who was staring down at him from the bridge.

  "I will see you in hell," Dorfheimer shouted.

  "I'm already in hell," Zebulon replied.

  Tossing the admiral's hat into the harbor, he pushed his way through the crowd on the dock.

  T DIDN'T TAKE HIM LONG TO FIND THE BUSTED FLUSH HOTEL, saloon, and Sporting Emporium, a three-story brick warehouse rising above a squalid row of one-story saloons, dry goods stores, and whorehouses. Inside, the cavernous space was jammed with sailors, gamblers, and prospectors, as well as the usual variety of thieves and entrepreneurs. There was no sign of Stebbins. In one corner, a crowd had gathered around a pit in which a wolverine was fighting a half-starved wolf. Across the room, two bare-fisted fighters were slugging each other into oblivion until the larger one, a three-hundred-pound Samoan, picked up his opponent as easily as a sack of flour and threw him against the wall, breaking his back.

  When challengers were called for, Zebulon stepped forward - much to the amusement of the crowd, who, by the look of his uniform and stubby half-grown hair, took him for a runaway convict or crazed East Coast Argonaut.

  Stripped to his waist, he was introduced as Admiral Doom, a champion of the Maldovian navy, undefeated in over a hundred bouts. Before the introduction was finished and bets were in place, the Samoan kicked him in the groin and tried to gouge out an eye. He struggled to his feet, only to fall back again as the Samoan raised his hands in victory. Waiting for the end, he experienced an unexpected stillness followed by a rush of energy that poured through his veins like water running through an open sluice gate. The release traveled up the length of his spine and launched him in a cold fury across the ring, where he pummeled the Samoan with blows to the head and body, followed by a vicious kick to the solar plexus. As the bewildered Samoan sank to his knees, Zebulon chopped down on his head. Then he broke his cheekbone with his forearm. The assault, as Stebbins wrote later in one of the San Francisco newspapers, lasted less than a minute and was as precise as an execution.

  The crowd broke into hysterical foot-stomping approval: "Hurrah for Admiral Doom!" they shouted. "Doom! Doom! Doom!"

  For his efforts, Zebulon received twenty-five dollars and a clean towel to wipe off the blood.

  He pushed his way to a side room where drinks were served from thin rubber tubes that allowed each customer to suck out all the booze he could handle until he ran out of breath or passed out. As the liquor trickled down his throat he heard a song drift over the raucous din, a voice that entered his heart like the pointed end of a stake:

  Delilah stood on a wooden platform at the back of the room wearing a low-cut red dress. Her eyes were half-closed, her face caked with thick makeup. The newcomers in the room had never seen anyone like her or experienced a voice so penetrating and melancholy. As she sang, two fiddlers and an accordion player provided enough rhythm to keep her on course:

  Zebulon noticed Stebbins sitting alone at a table, rocking back and forth as she repeated the last line to wild applause.

  His eyes narrowed as Zebulon sat down opposite him.

  "I heard you been writing lies about me," Zebulon said.

  Stebbins filled up his glass and pushed it towards Zebulon. "It's why I'm here: to satisfy the public's insatiable hunger and curiosity for frontier lore. And you, my friend, rank with the very best, thanks to my adventurously inflated prose."

  He looked over at Delilah. "Lucky for me that she has contributed more intimate details about you than any scribbler could wish for. How you forget to take off your boots when engaging in the act of love, how you become violent when you lose at cards or billiards, or how you obsessively invent your past. All touching human fallibilities which help make a story appealing and accessible."

  Zebulon walked over to Stebbins and lifted him off his chair.

  "Extry! Extry!" Stebbins shouted, struggling to free himself. "Read all about it! Deranged mountain man goes berserk! Kills reporter for spilling the beans about his outlaw past! Read about his squalid love affair with an Abyssinian courtesan and a Russian count!"

  Zebulon dropped him into his chair and sat down as Delilah launched into another song:

  "A word of advice," Stebbins said, pouring a drink. "Choose an alias. Especially in San Francisco. Anything but Admiral Doom. Admiral Death has more punch. Think about it. After all, death is what people out here know about. Death and gold. Never Doom. Doom is the last thing they want to hear about."

  They both turned to watch Delilah as she looked over at their table and began another song:

  She sang the next verse in Portuguese, or maybe it was another song altogether, stretching out the vowels and ending each verse with a melancholy wail that traveled slowly up from her belly to her throat. By the time she finished, several men were openly weeping, unable to control their buried longings and fears. One man shot his pistol at the ceiling. Others stood on their chairs and cheered, throwing coins and nuggets on the platform, which were scooped up by the musicians, who took half for themselves before they handed the rest to Delilah.

  Zebulon watched her weave slowly through the crowd, as if her fragile and weary body was struggling against a strong wind.

  "How amazing!" she said to Zebulon as she sat down. "You've Joined the German navy And become an officer as well. Although your uniform does need some repair." She poured herself a drink. "Is it true that the Germans have plans to take over California and Oregon, as well as Mexico and Alaska? Or is that the English?"

  He stared at her, shocked by how much weight she had lost and the deep lines around her mouth and eyes.

  "I know," she sighed. "I don't bear close inspection. A girl's joie de vivre can so easily vanish when she has to sing for her supper." She shook her head. "And what about you? You don't look so well yourself."

  She looked across the room where a waiter, no more than four feet tall, was maneuvering his way towards them, holding a tray over his black gnome-like head.

  "I was hoping someone had stepped on him," she said wearily as the dwarf placed a bottle of whiskey and two glasses on the table.

  Nodding at Zebulon, the strange dwarf spoke to Delilah in Portuguese.

  "Toku is confused about you," she said to Zebulon. "I don't know why. Why don't you tell us, Toku? We have no secrets at this table. Very few, anyway"

  The dwarf pointed at Zebulon.

  "Tell your friend to stay away from games of chance," he said with a clipped English accent, "or he'll end up in a ditch. If you know what I mean."

  "I don't know what you mean," she said.

  He shrugged and picked up his tray. "You know very well what I mean."

  "Do you plan to keep our appointment?" Delilah asked.

  "When I am ready. Not before. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find three guinea pigs? And not just any three guinea pigs. They all have to be the same age and color. And then there's the state of the moon, and various other elements that you have no knowledge of. If you ask me once more, or even look at me in the wrong way, you will find yourself talking to a stone wall."

  He turned and walked back across the room like a drunken sailor navigating his way across a rolling deck.

  "A friend of yours?" Zebulon asked.

  "He used to be some kind of pet or court jester for the Captain of an English ship," she explained. "When everyone went off to the gold fields, he stayed behind. When he heard me sing, he told me that he had known me in a past life. He's African. Every time I ask him what tribe he's from, he tells me something different - Baule, Bwiti, Pygmy. Whatever he is, he has strange powers and sees things other people can't. I suppose I have an addiction for second-sighted people."

  She started to gulp down a shot of whiskey, then thought better of it. Standing up, she steadied herself on the back of her chair, then slowly made her way out of the room.

  'E KNEW HE SHOULD LET HER GO, BUT HE FOLLOWED HER anyway, keeping out of sight as she stumbl
ed out a side door into an alley ankle-deep in mud. Once he thought he had lost her only to have her reappear and turn into a courtyard.

  He stood in the shadows as she knocked on the door of a wooden two-story house with narrow windows protected by iron bars. Once again he felt presented with a choice. In the past, he had set his course by his instincts and certain signs: a shift in the wind, a campfire on the horizon, tracks in the snow But now he felt only fear.

  When the door opened and Delilah disappeared inside, he continued down the alley to the waterfront. He could ride south to Mexico, he thought. But he had already made that journey. And now there was a bounty on him. Wanted. Dead or alive. He would be better off trying his luck in the gold fields. He had taken enough from Dorfheimer for a decent stake. Or he could go on the drift, up to Oregon or Alaska. He knew how to exist hand-to-mouth. Riding fence, rounding up cattle, busting horses - none of it mattered as long as he was free and unknown. He looked out at the harbor where anchor lights were blinking from hundreds of ships. The whole place was on the gallop with orders to fill. If one direction didn't work out, there would be ten more.

  The hell with her, he thought, then returned to where he had left her. He rolled a smoke in the courtyard, then stubbed it out and knocked on the door.

  A Chinaman opened the door, staring at him through spectacles the size of bird eggs. A long black queue fell past his waist and his reed-like body was covered with a silk maroon robe.

  Zebulon followed him into a claustrophobic low-ceilinged room lit by sputtering candles. In the dim half-light he made out a couch and a row of armchairs filled with shadowy figures that he figured were women for hire.

  "You want?" the Chinaman asked and snapped his fingers.

  A pubescent girl no more than fourteen rose up from a chair, clacking towards him on wooden sandals, a loose yellow shift hanging from her bony small-breasted frame.

  "Young delight," the Chinaman said. "Small buds. Like peaches. Good for the heart."

  His voice was oddly precise, as if he had learned English from a missionary

  "I'm lookin' for a woman," Zebulon said. "A mix. Not white or black. A long tangle of black hair."

  The Chinaman shook his head. "Delilah not for sale."

  "Not to buy," Zebulon insisted. "To talk."

  The Chinaman smacked his hands together as if killing a mosquito. "Twenty dollars. But no touch. Only smoke."

  After Zebulon paid, he followed the Chinaman into a back room that smelled of burned chestnuts. A low table held a lamp and several bowls filled with black opium paste. Emaciated men lay on their sides on narrow tiers of bunks, their heads resting on polished blocks of black wood. Delilah lay on a lower bunk, inhaling a long bamboo pipe lit by an old Chinese woman wearing a black high-necked dress.

  "Are you dreaming me?" she asked with a smile as he lay down beside her. "Or am I dreaming you? Or are we being dreamed by someone else?"

  She sucked at the pipe, then slowly exhaled.

  "Where's my necklace?"

  It took him a while to remember. "Stolen."

  "I'm not surprised. Everything else has been stolen or taken from me. The only thing left is to invest in loss.... Do you ever ask yourself who belongs to whom...? Or why? Or why- it is that most people prefer to rush towards their death rather than step out of the way?"

  The old woman offered him a pipe, then held up a long wire with a smudge of opium resin on the end. After he lit the resin, she motioned for Zebulon to inhale. He repeated the procedure several times until he turned on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

  Delilah's voice drifted over, like a leaf on a slow moving river. "If she rubs your feet, you'll float in the air."

  He wasn't floating. He was a frog pinned beneath a giant thumb until he moved a finger back and forth in front of his eves.

  "I betrayed Ivan," Delilah said. "And I betrayed you. But if you had stayed on the ship, Ivan would have killed you. He tried it before. In New Mexico. Or was it Turkey?"

  He remembered being a small boy and watching an eagle feather drift down from a blood-red sky and then land gently on his head.

  "It's a sign," his Pa said after he shot the eagle. "I'm damned if I know what it means. Only that it's better not to think about it."

  "Are you aware that dark spirits are searching for us?" Delilah asked. "For Ivan.... And for me.... And for you.... That's all they know how to do. They hunt for prey, and when they find it they swallow it, as if they intend to take on who they kill."

  They lay side by side, legs and sides barely touching, smoking and slipping in and out of each other's dreams. He felt suspended somewhere between earth and sky.

  "Or nowhere at all," he said to the fingers rubbing his feet.

  The thought was pleasing, that of going nowhere at all. Never to move on. Never to hunt. Never to leave one place for another. Or one woman for another.

  Her voice found him again. "After San Francisco, we rode north, Ivan and I.... So wild, so many rivers to cross and guns and horses. Ivan found more gold than anyone would ever need. Then he lost it all in a card game. He lost me, too.... So many men.... I was the only woman for a hundred miles... brutal men.... I never wanted to see you again.... You're wanted for murder... stealing horses... robbing banks.... A very dangerous man. When I saw you in that Mexican hotel I knew you were hunting me.... What I didn't know was that I was hunting you as well."

  He curled up like a frightened animal, his arm over his eyes, his heart beating as if he was imprisoned inside a trap.

  An old woman wrapped inside a man's button-down canvas jacket was bending down, holding a pipe, inviting him to inhale, to disappear into another dream....

  "Men came from everywhere to hear me sing," Delilah was saying. "Then Ivan found me again. He always does, you know. And then he leaves."

  Someone was playing a flute in another room and a woman was singing about love and a journey that never ends.

  "Now Ivan will die. When he abandoned me in London, an Englishman took me in. A singing teacher. An aristocrat.... I have a certain weakness for aristocrats. So distant and unobtainable.... He taught me opera.... How to speak and read English.... Every time I tried to leave him, he became very cruel."

  Across the room the Chinese girl was massaging the singer's feet, or maybe they were his own feet. Her scent made him feel as if he was lying in the middle of a garden. Or a cemetery.

  "Ivan found me making love to the Englishman," she went on. "He wanted to kill me. He had been in prison. In Russia.... They tortured him.... There are scars on his cheeks from cigarette burns. He's not a count, you know.... He's a spy and a scoundrel and a businessman. He smiled when he shot the Englishman through the head."

  He wondered if Ivan had shot him in Panchito. Or had it been Delilah? Or someone else? Was he, in fact, dead, and dreaming his life and how it had been or might have been? He was on a journey. He was sure of that. A journey that he was unable to track, without a beginning or end, with no boundaries to guide him.

  Her voice drifted back to him: "When my parents died, I lived with my grandmother.... She was over a hundred years old.... I had come to her in a dream before I was born.... Because I have mixed blood from many different races, she told me not to become trapped between worlds... I never listened to her, and now it is my fate... to learn how to die, over and over.... In my previous life I... I can't remember.... She told me to leave everything that I was attached to... even her, in order to be in the world but not of it.... When a Portuguese slaver killed my grandmother and took me away, I lost faith in God...."

  In the middle of the night, or the next day, he opened his eyes.

  Delilah was staring down at him.

  "Do you know who I am?" Her voice was a faint whisper, as if shivering through the tops of trees. "I am the one that hunts for redemption in the darkest night, the one who is imprisoned inside dreams within dreams. Because I have lost my way, I am hostage to all that floats between the worlds. Including you."

 
E FOLLOWED HER PAST THE LOST DREAMERS CURLED UP on their bunks and then down a narrow winding alley, stepping around buckets of waste tossed out of windows, abandoned mining equipment, and Argonauts passed out on soggy wooden planks.

  On the waterfront they collapsed against a pile of grain sacks stacked against an overturned wagon, falling asleep with their arms around each other. In front of them, thick layers of fog spread slowly over the harbor's armada of abandoned ships and the rows of river schooners lined up gunwale to gunwale along the sagging exhausted wharfs.

  They woke to a blaring trumpet and a pounding drum.

  A dozen men wearing shiny black suits appeared through the fog, marching behind a woman in a red fez and yellow pantaloons, holding up a sign announcing the end of the world and the grand opening of the Paradise Hotel.

  They sat leaning against each other, their bodies swaying like hollow reeds. The night had left them empty, without any sense of urgency or direction, free of all dreams and intentions. The fog had dissolved and the sun was spreading rays of light across the bay. On the street a small boy whistled as he pushed a ball ahead of him with a stick. A group of Brazilian sailors drifted hand in hand down the embarcadero, followed by a team of mules pulling a wagon loaded with mining equipment.

  "I'm going on alone," she said. "I'll come back tomorrow and look for you in this same place. If you're not here, I'll know that whatever happened between us has come to an end."

  He sat watching her as she stood up and, without a word, walked away from him. When she finally looked back, he stood up and followed her to the end of the embarcadero, then along a narrow grassy path that led through stunted windswept pine trees and thickets of wild rose bushes. Crossing a steep hill overlooking the sea, they stopped in front of a round hut constructed out of brush and torn canvas. In back of the hut, amulets and prayers written on strips of cloth hung from the branches of a towering oak tree. A wooden statue of a threebreasted woman guarded the hut's entrance. A smaller statue of a grinning monkey with a protruding belly stood behind it, the skin of a rattlesnake wrapped around its neck.