The Drop Edge of Yonder

by Rudolph Wurlitzer

  "Go ahead and shoot him." Large Marge was looking over at them. "And her, too. He'd do the same. Or if you lose your nerve, shoot me. Or yourself. Anything that shuts down all this stupid goddamn palaver and poochin' around with each other."

  Disgusted with a situation that was more than she could or wished to understand, she pulled a blanket over her head.

  Hatchet Jack handed the Colt to Delilah, who shifted it from one hand to the other. Then she handed the Colt to Zebulon, who handed it back to Delilah.

  Hatchet Jack stood up, pulling on his pants. "Tomorrow we'll ride after Plaxico. He's waiting on the Yuba. He drew me a map.

  He removed a slab of cowhide from his shirt pocket. CALFORNIE was scratched above a line of arrows pointing to the northwest, ending in a three-masted sailing ship. Another scratch of letters was marked ORAGON.

  Delilah pressed the Colt between her breasts with both hands.

  "Is that all we need? A map? Is that why we're here? To ride on, and then ride on some more, and then some more again after someone who rides after us, or maybe ahead of us, because we don't know how to ride after ourselves? If that's true, then let's ride up to Oregon and find whoever it is we're looking for. Maybe Plaxico, whoever he is, will tell us what we're doing, even if he doesn't know, or if he does, but can't say why. You choose. I don't care."

  She fired a bullet into a tree trunk and stalked off into the night.

  When she returned they were sleeping, or at least pretending to be. Choosing a spot away from Hatchet Jack and Zebulon, she curled up alone with her arms crossed over her breasts.

  Above them, dark clouds swept beneath a full moon, like blotches of spilled ink. Somewhere a wolf howled. Then two more, until the whole pack joined into one mournful chorus.

  They slept through the night, together and apart, too exhausted to dream, or hear the howling of the wolves.

  ATCHET JACK LED THE WAY OVER GRASSY HILLS DOTTED with goldenrod and manzanita berries. To the east, a rainbow, thin and pointed as the end of a cue stick, hovered over a waterfall. Above, eagles soared. At the sound of their horses' hooves, antelope and deer scattered ahead, then stopped to stare back with huge startled eyes.

  After crossing the headwaters of the Sacramento River and Cottonwood Creek, they negotiated a series of hills covered with tangled alder and thick groves of maple. Further on, as they emerged from a stand of spruce, they saw a thin column of smoke curling against the horizon.

  They climbed towards a rocky outcrop. The thin air left them speechless, their minds empty, as if they had entered a stillness that had always been there, a magical land free of stagnation and death, where nothing had ever happened nor was yet to come.

  Their dreamy preoccupations were interrupted by the clink, clink of pick axes and shovels. Beneath them, through strips of foamy mist, a mining camp of shacks and tents had been set up along the bank of the river - a roaring cascade that plunged down the middle of a steep gorge.

  The only shack with four walls stood apart from the others on a small rise. A sign across the door read:

  SUPPLIES AND GEAR - AFFORDABLE PRICES.

  Delilah pointed to Cox, the Englishman from The Rhinelander, as he walked up the rise towards the shack, followed by three Miwoks carrying heavy sacks of grain on their heads and shoulders. After Cox directed the Miwoks inside, he sat down on a bench near the door, lighting up a hand-rolled cheroot.

  Beneath him, a line of exhausted men worked tailrace ditches and flutter wheels. Further downriver, half-naked Chinese, Mexicans, and Indians stood waist-deep in freezing water, shifting gravel back and forth in wooden rockers.

  Suddenly a Miwok let out a low cry. Kneeling down, he pressed an ear to the ground. Immediately the other Miwoks working upriver threw down their rocker pans and ran into a dense stand of silver fir, just ahead of the Warden as he galloped into the camp.

  A slanted cockade hat was pulled over the Warden's forehead. His frail body, bent with dysentery and choleric rage, was covered with a torn red cloak. Behind him, the Sheriff led a ragged platoon of guards and three horse-drawn supply wagons. Further back, struggling to keep up, Stebbins and the photographer pulled two mules loaded with camera equipment and several racks of Spanish wine.

  "We're looking for the outlaw, Zebulon Shook," the Warden shouted. "We know he rode this way. If any man has information about his whereabouts, now is the time to speak up."

  No one spoke. Most of those present had never heard of Zebulon Shook - not that they would have betrayed him if they had, or any other outlaw, given their own problematic histories.

  "One last chance," the Warden shouted again.

  When no one came forward, he nodded to the Sheriff, who pulled out his pistol and shot a Chilean miner through the foot.

  Except for Cox, who had run into his shack at the first sign of the Warden, everyone else shouted what they knew, or thought they knew about Zebulon, even if most of their information was invented: "He went to ground, General. Who knows where -"; "New Mexico or Coloradv -' ; "Oklahoma -"; "El Paso is what I heard -"; "People seen him on the Brazos -' ; "He took down a bank in Sliver City, shot up half the town -' ; "Killed a man in Placerville -"; "Set up camp on the Frazier River with a bunch of renegades -"; "Halfway to Vancouver -"; "That mulatto whore leading him by his nose ring -"; "On the way to Oregon, with some Minnesotans -"

  "Apprehend that man!" the Warden shouted, pointing towards a Chinaman crouching behind a sluice gate, his face half-hidden beneath a split-bamboo hat.

  As two soldiers ran towards him, Lu wrenched a board from the gate and waded into the river. Holding onto the board, he let himself be swept over the boiling rapids, his long black queue trailing behind him like a snake as he disappeared down the river.

  Everyone ran in different directions except for a dozen Chinamen holding rocker pans in front of their faces. Two were shot out of hand, then three more running into the trees. The rest stood in the water, hands raised in surrender.

  The Warden rode furiously back and forth as his men spread out through the camp, bursting into shacks and tents and shooting anyone that resisted, and even a few that didn't. When a large stash of gold was discovered beneath one of Cox's floorboards, he was clubbed, his gold confiscated, and his shack burned to the ground.

  The violence stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving in its wake the roar of the river, which was almost loud enough to drown out the cries and moans of the wounded.

  As if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, wagons were unpacked and a table and chairs were set up for lunch by the river for the Warden, who was joined by the Sheriff, the photographer, and Stebbins.

  While they drank wine and smoked cigars, waiting to be served a warm meal, the photographer set up his tripod.

  "Hold it right there, gentlemen," the photographer shouted. "Perfect.... Warden, if you would be so kind as to move to your left three inches. That's right, your left.... Perfect.... Now, if you could all look straight ahead, towards the river.... No one move.... Beautiful."

  "We ought to shoot 'em all and get it over with," Hatchet Jack said as the camera flash went off.

  "I can drop a few with the Sharps," Zebulon said.

  "No point in stirring a hornet's nest," Large Marge advised. "Otherwise, I guarantee, vengeance will hound us forever, or at least until we get to Oregon."

  They stayed where they were, looking over the edge of the rocky outcrop until the Warden and his men rode off with the rest of his troops. They were followed in a wagon by Stebbins, the photographer, and the Sheriff, all of them too drunk to mount their horses.

  Y THE TIME THEY REACHED THE CAMP, MOST OF THE ANGLO (miners had fled and the remaining Chinese, Mexicans, and Indians were either dead or wounded.

  Delilah tore up shirts for bandages and fashioned crude splints while Large Marge cooked a thick gruel of potatoes and mashed-up corn.

  Hatchet Jack and Zebulon found Cox lying with his head against a grain sack, a line of blood oozing from his thigh like a
fat worm.

  "Gold is what I had," he muttered. "Gold is what I lost. A whore's dream slopped on a saloon floor by all the demons of hell."

  Zebulon wandered off towards the river. He remembered other gunfights and massacres: a rancher and his wife and five children scalped and decapitated, an old trapper starved to death a mile from his cabin, an Arapahoe village wiped out from plague, settlers and prospectors drowned, hung, or shot. All of it seen and taken for granted.

  As he looked at the row of bodies lying near the river, the roar of the rapids exploded into his heart.

  he next day the dead were buried in a long ditch on a small rise facing the river. Archibald Cox offered the eulogy, an act he was well suited for, having studied for the ministry in the north of England.

  "Life has gotten out of hand. It has become bigger and uglier and, at the same time, more beautiful and more precious than we first knew it to be. Gone are our dreams. Gone is the irreverent and irreplaceable spirit of youth that gave us the blind courage to journey here in the first place. As we stand in solemn contemplation before these graves, we can no longer take our lives for granted. But the Lord protects us by lowering a veil over our suffering. In His mercy, He provides us with enough grace to survive, and soon we will turn away from the dead and we will go on because we have no choice. To be born is to die and soon enough all that will be left of us will be memories of who we were, and then, not even those. Our tears cannot produce the green of May or make love bloom again. But it will, just the same. That is what we live for."

  He sat facing the river, unable to speak until he was handed a bottle of whiskey Then he proceeded, along with the rest of the survivors, to drink himself into oblivion.

  he next morning, Cox and the rest of the Argonauts agreed that there was still gold to be found in the valley and that others would be coming soon enough to make their own grabs. They decided to hold on and defend what they had, rebuild what was left of their shacks, work their claims, and then get out before it was too late.

  For their part, the Mexicans chose to head back across the border, except for a youthful fruit farmer from Chiapas who was determined to find Plaxico, convinced that the old brujo could see into the future and point the way to a mother lode, or at least a big enough score to stake him to another fruit farm south of the border.

  The remaining Chinese set out for San Francisco, where they planned to earn enough wages for passage back to China, or, failing that, to remove themselves forever from the gold rush and all that it stood for.

  ATCHET JACK LED ZEBULON AND THE OTHERS TOWARDS the coast, avoiding Redding and Plumas City, as well as the Applegate Trail with its new settlements and mining camps. Three days later they crossed the Feather River and proceeded due west, passing Mount Shasta at dusk, its snow-covered cone barely visible through luminous layers of melancholy cloud.

  The next morning they came upon the deep ruts of wagon tracks, followed by a trail of household goods - a smashed Chippendale dresser, a leather couch, broken chairs and china dishes, torn pages from a leather-bound Bible, an upright piano, and an array of mining and farming tools - all scattered across a grassy meadow. The slashed portrait of a Puritan minister and his equally severe wife leaned against a wagon wheel near the mutilated bodies of five men and women. Further on, halfhidden in high bunchgrass, a young girl holding a rag doll in her arms lay sprawled across the chest of a black woman wearing a ripped and shredded high-necked gingham dress. Both of them were dead.

  A voice rose up behind them: "Mad. All mad. The Warden and his merry band of lunatics."

  Stebbins crawled out from underneath a wagon and collapsed at Delilah's feet, coughing up clots of blood.

  "They thought the woman was you and they rode in shooting. I told them... I told them... they had it wrong, but they shot her anyway. Then someone shot me."

  Delilah held Stebbins in her arms until his breath left him. Then she laid him on the ground, walked over to the dead girl, took the doll from her hands, and wandered off into the bunchgrass.

  Zebulon and Hatchet Jack found her sitting on the ground, rocking the doll in her arms. As she started to sing, dark clouds moved slowly above them like a lonely funeral procession:

  After they buried Stebbins and the pilgrims, they rode for a few miles until dusk, when they made a small fire. No one spoke or ate. That night they all slept together, Hatchet Jack and Zebulon on either side of Delilah, Large Marge curled up next to the Mexican fruit farmer.

  t dawn they pushed on, encouraged by a warm breeze that ,carried a hint of the sea. When they reached Goose Lake, an expanse of ice-blue water as calm and flat as glass, they stripped off their clothes and waded into the cold water, splashing and waving their arms like children.

  That evening they stayed compulsively busy, as if they were protecting themselves from unknown dangers.

  Large Marge prepared a meal of biscuits and horse meat while Delilah led the horses to the lake, rubbing them down with handfuls of wet grass. The Mexican fruit farmer sat on a rock, fishing with a crude hook fashioned from the prong of his belt buckle. Further away, Zebulon stood on the shore, watching a blue heron with a damaged wing try to launch itself over the water. Over and over the heron flapped its wings, only to fall back and try again.

  A shot rang out, a bullet blowing the heron's head off.

  Hatchet Jack walked up to Zebulon.

  "A bird can't fly with one wing," he said, shoving the Colt inside his belt. "Never has, never will."

  "Are you sayin' I can't fly with one wing?" Zebulon asked.

  "I'm sayin' one of us will fly and the other one won't."

  "Won't what?"

  Hatchet Jack shrugged, not having thought that far ahead.

  He walked towards a canoe half-hidden in a copse of tall reeds and water lilies. When he climbed in and started to paddle the canoe into the lake, Zebulon waded into the water and held it back by the stern.

  Hatchet Jack lifted the paddle over his head, neither of them moving as each waited for the other to make a decision.

  "Are you comin' or goin'?" Hatchet Jack asked, putting down the paddle. "Maybe you're spooked, hein' in water? Tell you one thing. If you drown, they won't have to hang you."

  Zebulon climbed into the canoe and sat in the stern while Hatchet Jack paddled into the lake. Finally he let the canoe drift.

  "How long we been knowin' each other?" he asked.

  "Long enough," Zebulon answered.

  "Except when you tried to kill me, or me you, we managed to get along. I pushed you onto your first whore, pulled you out of a beaver trap, fixed your busted leg, and kept you from gettin' scalped more'n once."

  "You also pushed my head underwater a few times," Zebulon said.

  "All right," Hatchet Jack said. "And you slammed me out more'n once. That makes us even."

  "Is that what Plaxico told you to say?"

  "He told me I had to make it up to you, and Elijah and Annie May.

  "What business is it of his?"

  "Otherwise, he said - Do you want to know or not?"

  Zebulon didn't answer, but Hatchet Jack told him anyway. "It was Plaxico that lost me in that poker game to your Pa. He tracked me down to tell me. Ever since, he's been tryin' to get straight with me, teachin' me things. Otherwise he says it won't sit right with him and he'll have a bad ride into the misty beyond. He says he ain't got much time left on this earth. Him bein' a lnw]o, who's to say he don't?"

  They sat watching the setting sun slide behind the mountains. When the light was gone from the lake, Hatchet Jack removed the Colt from inside his belt, shifting it from one hand to the other. "You think it was me that drilled you back in that saloon?"

  "Well, was it?"

  "What do you think?"

  "I think it was."

  "Well, it weren't."

  "Maybe you wish it was," Zebulon said.

  "That's different."

  Hatchet Jack lowered the Colt. "You left her and I never did. That's why she favors me mo
re'n you."

  He handed the Colt to Zebulon. "Go ahead and smoke me. I'm tired of chasin' and bein' chased. Tired of not knowin' what's a dream and what ain't. Tired of you, tired of what Plaxico is layin' on me, tired of poochin' or not poochin' your witch, and tired of ridin' down lost trails to the middle of nowhere."

  Zebulon raised the Colt, more out of frustration than anger, and then handed it back to Hatchet Jack, who shoved it in his belt.

  "We're fixed on the wrong target," Hatchet Jack said. "It's Delilah. No matter what Plaxico says, one of us should blow her away. Plaxico knows things we don't, but he don't know how bad she's been twistin' our tails. But we won't do that, will we?"

  "No," Zebulon agreed.

  "And I won't blow you away."

  "True enough."

  "So maybe we ought to let her decide who she favors?"

  "She ain't capable," Zebulon said. "That's clear. Not when her belly's ready to spring loose and not knowin' who the Pa is. It could be you' Could be me. Or maybe the Count, or someone else. We didn't ask for it and neither did she, and that's just the way it is."

  They beached the canoe and were walking along the shore towards the camp when Zebulon stopped.

  Without warning he slugged Hatchet Jack on the jaw, then hit him in the stomach and pushed him backward into the lake.

  "That was for bringin' up all that stuff, and for makin' it worse with Delilah. Bein' pushed into the lake was just for old time's sake."

  Hatchet Jack waded out of the water, pointing the Colt at Zebulon's head.

  Zebulon smiled, spreading out his arms. "Go ahead. Find out if the Colt fires when it's wet. Smoke one into me. You'll be doin' me a favor, somethin' you ain't never done before."

  When Hatchet Jack pulled the trigger, the gun didn't fire.