Cape Hell

by Loren D. Estleman

  Joseph busied himself with the engine while I retrieved the Whitney rifle and scouted out the location, gripping the weapon in one hand and a bull’s-eye lantern in the other. I tipped open the louvers, directing the beam inside the arrangement of mossy logs with a roof made of rocky outcrop and an extension of poles shingled with bark. Apart from the usual rubbish of temporary habitation and the palpable odor of earth, mildew, and sodden wood-ash, it was unoccupied, at least by humans. I’d half expected to disturb a sow bear sleeping with her cubs or at the very least a nest of rats. A beetle nearly the size of my hand stirred and scaled the Pike’s Peak of my toe, that was all. I shook free of it and hung the lantern from the end of a pole by its bail to investigate the rest.

  A pile of moldy rags got the attention first of my nose, then my eyes as a likely resting place for rattlers. It lay heaped in the corner where a windscreen of logs chinked with clay and dead leaves met the side of the hill, where a previous tenant would have flung it to lighten his load before venturing back out. I picked up a stick, poked at the heap, and when nothing issued forth twisted the stick, winding a bit of rotting cloth around the end, and tugged it free. Something tumbled out, rattling like hollow wooden flutes; something rolled across the packed clay floor and came to rest against my foot, leering up at me with the porcelain grin of death.

  I started; but I’d seen human skulls before. Stripped of flesh and gutted of brains, they offered no harm. It wore a patch of black hair like peat on a rock and two inches above the right eye-socket a hexagonal hole as big as my fist. It might have been made by a stone falling, but I doubted it.

  “Que pasa?” Joseph’s call, bent out of shape by damp and distance. I ignored it, stirring the stick among the bones. Something crackled; I speared it and brought it up into the light. It was a scrap of foolscap, as yellow as any of the dead leaves stuck among the chinking between the logs, but marked with script written in faded ink:

  gone up the tracks for help, but

  That was it: a journal entry of some kind. Who’d gone up the tracks for help I might never know, but if he’d returned with it he’d been too late.

  I brought the scrap close to my eyes. It seemed to be deteriorating as I looked at it, from sudden exposure to the open air, like the mummified remains of an ancient Incan king disinterred after centuries; but it was more recent than that. Like Judge Blackthorne, I had little faith in a man’s personality revealing itself in his hand, but I knew a closed loop from an uncrossed t; and I knew as sure as I was a hundred miles from the civilized world that I was reading the last words of Agent DeBeauclair, the Pinkerton operative who’d disappeared after filing his last report on Oscar Childress.

  “A friend?”

  I jumped again. Joseph stood in the entrance, the light from the lantern lying on his square cheeks and the edge of the axe in his hand.

  * * *

  “DeBeauclair is a French name, sí?” The Indian crunched cracked corn. “I would think he would look more foreign.”

  I sat across the fire from him in the entrance of the dugout, the Whitney across my lap. The fire was of my own making, chunks from the tender chopped into kindling with the axe Joseph had brought. The light of the flames crawled and twitched over the bone face where it had come to rest, changing its expression from amused idiocy to deep contemplation. Outside, tree frogs, night birds, crickets, and cicadas made a racket, as deafening as in any city. The bay, hobbled just outside the halo of heat, grazed and switched its tail at mosquitoes the size of chimney swifts. I ate beef from the tin with a spoon, washed it down with water, and passed him the canteen. “We’re all the same under the skin. What do you think made that hole?”

  “A rock from a sling or a stone axe.” He drank, his jaws grinding without cease. His molars must have been worn down to stumps.

  “Not a ball from a percussion weapon.”

  “I know of none that would make a wound that size.”

  “I do. I saw my share of them in the war.”

  “I cannot think why white people should make war on each other except over horses.”

  “We can’t all be as civilized as Indians. Who do you think he sent for help?”

  “Someone unreliable, I should think.”

  Something cried, sounding close. In town, I would have put it down to a colicky baby. In that country it made the hairs bristle at the top of my spine. “There’s your puma. You must have a cousin or two left.”

  “I think I am that cousin. Perhaps my great-great-grandfather destroyed all the litter-mates of a cat that has sworn not to die until it has done for his family as well.”

  “It didn’t kill the detective, that’s plain. There’d be no bones left to tell the tale.”

  “Bandits. Yellow fever, and the hole came later. The great bird of death swooped down and snatched his soul. Where is the good in guessing? He is beyond caring.”

  “He cared enough to write something, but that scrap is all that’s left.” I’d found a ball of shredded paper left by a brood of mice. They’d built the nest inside the dead man’s rib cage, from the record of his last days. “What was he doing here? It’s a long way into the wilderness, even if he rode a horse or took along a pack animal.”

  He helped himself to another handful of corn. “What are you doing here?”

  “They say, even his enemies, that Childress is a brilliant man. I came to see what makes him shine.”

  “You wish to learn from him about horses and making money?”

  “If he brings them up; not that I care a shuck about horses, and money runs out between my fingers like water. I expect to hear about poetry, philosophy, history, governing, science, and religion.”

  “What will you do with what you learn?”

  “Something, possibly. Nothing, maybe. Sometimes knowledge alone is enough.”

  He shook his head, rooting in his sack for corn. Those loose kernels had reality for him, purpose and meaning.

  “And after you have learned these things, you will kill him.”

  “Those are the orders. The killing, that is. I added the other.”

  “It is like squeezing all the good out of an orange and throwing away the skin.”

  “Very like.” I scraped up the last of the beef, ate it, and set the tin on the ground.

  He turned his face into the wind. It carried the smell of brimstone. “The dry season is early. We must take on water tomorrow. There is a tower twenty miles ahead. Nearer twenty-five. After that we must draw it from the earth.”

  “A village?”

  He shook his head. “Only the tower, and such as gathers there. Good local beer and a woman.”

  “Just one?”

  “I would not say ‘just’ of this woman.”

  His face showed no amusement. A man of his kind, in a place like that, didn’t leer about such things. They were like water and meat. “What about you?” I asked. “What made you come all this way?”

  He spoke without raising his eyes, poking a stick at the fire. They reflected the light like pieces of polished coal.

  “I wish to be the first of my people to pilot a train from the top of Mexico to the bottom. Then perhaps I will be made an engineer in truth as well as in name.”

  “That’s important?”

  “My father and all my brothers died, either in the mines or from the dirt that filled their lungs. It is not my wish to die as they did.”

  “They should be grateful.”

  He looked up at me sharply, his hand still gripping the stick. “Why?”

  “The mines got to them before the puma.”

  He looked down again and resumed stirring the ashes. “I did not think of that.”

  The noises from outside increased, as if whoever directed them had raised his baton. Further conversation seemed not worth the effort to compete. I mixed water from the canteen with a handful of Arbuckle’s and set the pot on a flat rock by the fire, turning it from time to time as the Indian munched.

  “Do you think the
men who run the railroads will not want to make me an engineer because I killed the one I worked for?”

  “Not the railroad men I’ve met.”

  He smiled, pieces of corn shell stuck between his teeth. When the coffee was ready I filled two cups and handed him one. He wrapped his hands around the tin as if they needed the heat, but he didn’t drink from it at first. “I think they would choose the puma,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “My father and my brothers. It is better to be eaten by an animal than by the dust from a shaft.”

  “Quicker, anyway.”

  Outside the dugout the big cat cried.

  SIXTEEN

  The hot wind blew perpendicular to the train, booming the side of the stock car where the bay doubtlessly fiddle-footed and tossed its head, trying to crawl out of its hide. My own skin prickled as if I’d fallen into a crock of needles. I was afraid to touch my lips in case they peeled off in paper-thin layers. Every time I stoked the fire I felt like a pig on a spit, my skin turning orange and crackling. Joseph, manning the throttle and leaning out the opening on his side to look ahead for obstructions, showed no reaction other than to take a long draught from the canteen when I handed it to him. A goatskin bag hung inside the cab, pregnant with water, but he told me to resist using it to refill the canteen. He didn’t say why.

  I looked out at the pinon and fescue flying past. The green seemed to fade as I watched, the grass blades shriveling like dead petals on a fireplace grate. “What about fires?” I asked.

  “I brake as little as possible, but one cannot prevent every spark. The thing is to keep the burning country behind us.”

  “What happens when we stop?”

  “Oh, the fires stop too. We have an agreement, this place and I.”

  They say, the experts back East who know everything, that Indians have no humor in the white man’s understanding of the term. I’ve been the length and breadth of the West looking for one who could answer an honest question with anything but a macabre joke.

  When we did stop, to conserve steam for the last run to the water tower, we struck off down the track to confirm his agreement with the wilderness. I carried six pails of sand, strung out three on each side of a yoke across my shoulders, which I used to put out sporadic buds of flame along the cinderbed while Joseph chopped brush with his faithful axe, piled it, and wet it down with water from the goatskin bag to create a firebreak.

  “You might have told me what it was for.” I tugged my bandanna back down below my chin. The top half of my face would be black.

  “Too much talking dries the throat.”

  I watched the wind baking the wetness from the limbs. I could smell wood still burning a mile or so down the rails, hear the whoosh of flame consuming a parched pinon in one gulp. “I can’t claim confidence.”

  “You expect too much. These forests have burned to the ground many times. They continue to burn until the rains come, or until they reach woods so dense the flames can find no more air to breathe. It has always been so, a thousand times a thousand years before men came with sand and water to put them out, or there would be no trees left to burn. To slow down the fire is as much victory as we can expect.”

  As we turned back toward the train, something rustled in the undergrowth; a deer or an elk, possibly a bear. The woods were too dense for my eyes to penetrate. I remembered the cry of the puma, and Joseph’s constant reference to bandits, and picked up my pace. I’d left the Whitney rifle behind to carry the pails and didn’t like the odds of defending myself with hip guns from an enemy I couldn’t see. I wasn’t sure I could even slow it down.

  * * *

  The Ghost labored up a long grade, panting like a stove-in horse. For an hour and a half Joseph had been staring at the gauges with an expression I never want to see on a doctor’s face with me as the patient. I had the impression we were running on a teaspoon of water, and asked if what was left in the canteen, the goatskin, and the kegs of fresh drinking water in the parlor car would help.

  “A drop in the ocean,” he said. “We have fifty gallons in the boiler, and to expect it to take us beyond this grade would be to tempt God.”

  It was my first intimation that he’d been converted; and my first lesson in just how much even a small engine drank.

  Nearing the top we slowed to a crawl. Less than that; it seemed the trees were moving forward rather than backward, and slowly enough at that to count the leaves. If any bandits were close at hand, that would be the time to strike. Over and over again I rehearsed in my mind the move toward the Whitney rifle leaning in the corner, wondering if I’d be better served by the shorter distance to one of the revolvers on my hips. The moment required for the decision alone, in the heat of action, might kill us both.

  The boiler wheezed; the stack cried for smoke, I fed the box. The drive-rods that turned the wheels strained agonizingly slow, like a milk-maid churning at the edge of fatigue, rotating stubborn steel against the friction of the rails, steel also: What had been designed as a partnership of identical elements was deteriorating into a contest, Philadelphia versus Detroit, or more internally still, the fraction of temperature between one smelting-vat and another. The slightest variance in joints, a spike driven an eighth of an inch off true, or not driven flush, a tiny flaw in the crucible back at the finery, a bubble formed when a piece was removed from the cast; an indifferent laborer a thousand miles away at the end of his shift, who said good was good enough, and fair fair, had sealed the fates of two men in a place whose name on a map he couldn’t pronounce.

  What if it wasn’t an illusion, and we were rolling back down the grade? Would the brakes hold, or would the natural law of gravity take over where the efforts of man had failed, plummeting us at breakneck speed toward the level, where a sharp curve I remembered would flip us off the rails like an annoying bug, the whole ludicrous link of cars like a string of sausages sent down the steep flanks of the Mother Range into a pile of scrap iron and crushed flesh at the base?

  Was I raised in a trapper’s shack at the top of the Bitterroots to die in a tangle of metal at the bottom of a pimple of a hill in Mexico?

  “There it is,” said Joseph.

  I started. He’d said it as if we’d come through a light rain into bright sunshine.

  It was bright, at that, shining on a squat wooden barrel the size of my furnished room in Helena, mounted on spindly legs of pine bound with thongs with the bark intact. Beads glittered on the staves as on a glass of ice-cold beer.

  “I wondered some,” he said. “She was working herself that last half-mile.”

  “‘Wondered’?” I wanted to swallow back the word; I knew I’d been had for a fool.

  He leaned on the brake, his face grave. “I always worry along this stretch. It asks much of a boiler this size.”

  It had been an initiation of some kind. I should have recognized it, army and bunkhouse veteran that I was. All that talk of pumas and bandits and relatives done to violent death had lured me into the oldest game of all. He was leaning out the opening on his side. I waited for him to turn away before I struck him between the eyes. I saw his shoulder stiffen; not at the thought of my assault, but by something he’d seen up ahead. By the time he drew himself back inside, my fist was back down at my side. I don’t know now if it was his dead-blank expression that made me relax my fingers or the stench prickling the hairs in my nostrils. They’d become inured to the smell of burning, but this one came with the sweet tint of roast pork. I’d come across it before, not at communal events behind a ranch house, but in the heat of battle, with dead men shot at such close range the powder-flare set fire to their flesh.

  He alighted; but not before tugging his bandanna up around his nose and mouth. I did the same with mine and stepped down behind him.

  There was no smoke; the fires that had caused it had gone out long since. Beyond the water tower, which had remained untouched, a briarpatch of blackened timber poked up at random angles from acres of ash; knee-deep, should on
e want to wade into it. We didn’t. The stench of burnt flesh alone held us back. Such shells of humanity that lay swaddled in those ashes would add nothing to what we already knew.

  A white boulder, sunk so far into the earth as to suggest it had tumbled down from the mountains years before, bore a sign, etched likely with a charred stick and pounded pale gray by sporadic rainfall: a reverse crucifix, with the crosspiece at the bottom.

  Joseph crossed himself, confirming my suspicions of conversion, and pronounced three syllables that chilled the oven-baked Sierras to the bone:

  “Cholera.”

  I placed my palm against my bandanna, pressing it to my face. “Not yellow fever? You said there’s plenty of cinchona in these woods.”

  “For that, they would not try to burn out the contagion and then flee. There is no medicine for this evil. It kills and kills until it has gorged itself with death.”

  “Do we turn back?”

  He was silent; thinking. After a moment he shook his head.

  “No. They have burned it out, the survivors. Their only hope to survive is to press ahead.”

  “And if they haven’t burned it out?”

  “Then they carry it with them; or turn back to escape it.” He stared at the ground. “I was wrong. I think they have turned back. There is nothing ahead.”

  “What about the water?”

  He was motionless; then shook himself and tilted his chin toward the squat tower.

  “The Ghost is already dead. No contagion can infect it. We will fill up and move on.”

  “You’re sure they turned back? That they haven’t taken the disease into our path?”

  Just then something whooshed, a half-mile down track, if that: another stand of trees gone up in flame.

  “The fire behind,” he said; “the plague ahead. What have we to lose?”

  SEVENTEEN

  With both hands, Joseph tugged an extra cap down to the bridge of my nose, pulled up my bandanna, and tied it tight around the lower half of my face, with all the firm and caring attention of a mother bundling up her child to go out into a blizzard.