Neither of them knew the fate of the other three. They didn’t see them swim around the bend and onward. The young man made it to shore by the sheer force of his cursing efforts. The other white man tried but could gain no control of his squat body. His long arms lashed out in a chaos of motion, and in the end he simply watched with wide eyes as he slid down a flume of water and into a wall of foaming backwash. It hit him in the face with a force beyond anything he would have thought possible. The down-rushing current flipped him over and pushed him to the bottom of the river. When he surfaced, he was blue and nearly dead and so exhausted he could not move his limbs. It wouldn’t have helped if he could. He came up in water bubbling upstream. He was pushed back into the same flume. When he next hit the surface, he didn’t try to breathe but only looked at the sky for a few seconds. The current pushed him down and let him up again and again, like a rag doll, like a toy meant to look human but that had never had, and would never have, a beating heart.
It was the black boy who swam the farthest. He slid along the canyon wall, his fingers searching vainly for a hold. He had just about given up in body and mind when the river calmed into a long pool of slow-moving water. He floated on his back, buoyant now that he’d stopped fighting. The evening’s light dimmed; the clouds above him rolled on and spent their fury. He cried. Finally, after so many days under the weight of his own mind, he floated free of it. He felt himself wrapped within a deep, somber embrace that was beyond reason or conscious thought but was emotion wrung to its core, to its length and breadth, and left exhausted.
It was strange, he thought, floating like this, letting go like this. Strange that everything now seemed so clear. Stars appeared, and the boy watched the dancing play of their light across the river’s surface. He found a beauty in this that was akin to no portion of his soul. He knew now that he would not swim for shore. He thought of his friend and almost formed his name on his lips. If his friend could only feel what he now felt coming . . . If he could only know what it feels like to swim into the heavens.
GABRIEL RODE AT A GALLOP as long as the light held. He slowed to a canter when he could no longer see the land before him or make any sense of directions, then eventually eased into a dull, halting plod. He could barely make out the highlights that were the horse’s gray ears, and he could feel the animal’s fatigue in her labored breathing and reluctant steps. But he wouldn’t let her stop. All he thought of was movement. It seemed the only thing that could save him, and he rode the entire night, his eyes open and his mind alert. More than once he believed he heard pursuers. More than once he asked the horse to tread less heavily on the ground and to keep to herself her complaints and neighs.
By morning he had put fifteen miles between himself and the others. As the sun rose, he realized he’d crossed the great bowl and risen into a rugged, rust-colored wilderness of decaying hills and cacti. He was amazed that the horse had managed to pick her way through the thorny landscape, but he didn’t pause to commend the creature. He didn’t trust the distance. He didn’t trust his own eyes. The coast was clear, not a soul to be seen, yet still, each time he turned his gaze forward, he felt riders at his back—which ones, why, and with what motive didn’t matter. He must flee them all.
He kept it up all day, pausing only to water the horse at another fork of the Colorado River, a shallow canyon that proved not difficult to cross. The horse would have stayed by its waters, but Gabriel pushed her on. The afternoon took them into a landscape dotted with buttes and strewn with rocks. Water pooled in sulfurous depressions that made their progress a winding, uncertain one. The air was a rank substance, thick in the nostrils and more like a liquid than the thin gas it was meant to be. It attacked the boy’s eyes and stung the back of his throat. But he pushed on, forgetting the land behind him and not even pausing to consider the land to come.
Gabriel remembered late in the afternoon that a horse could be ridden to death. He dismounted, suddenly aware that the creature had been pushed to the limit of her endurance and teetered at the edge of oblivion. She walked delicately on her left forehoof, and judging by the way she shook her head, she seemed to have trouble seeing. Gabriel led her on patiently, slowly, and yet unrelentingly. He wished her to live, but life meant movement.
The two camped that evening beside a shallow creek that held water only in stagnant pools between the rocks. It took Gabriel some time to find an opening deep enough to scoop up water with his hands. His fingers stirred up muck from the rocks, but he drank anyway, till he was bloated and exhausted from the effort of it. Only then, lying on his back and staring into the sky of early evening, with the horse still lapping at the water a few feet away, did he pause long enough to wonder what had happened to the others. Yes, he’d seen them drive their horses into a raging river. He’d seen the phalanx of riders closing in behind them, he’d felt the palpable fear in each man, and he’d cringed beneath the pressure of the downpour that sought to drown them all where they stood. But what had happened next? It seemed impossible that they could live through the moments to follow, and yet he could believe only so much as he’d seen. And he hadn’t seen Marshall die, or Caleb. Those two might never die, at least not through an act of man.
Nonetheless, he believed quite completely that James was now dead. It had been written on his face for some time. He saw James’s face before him with a clarity beyond that of the actual moment, and he asked himself questions whose answers he already knew by heart. Had his eyes really been so torn by betrayal? Had he been so painfully aware of all that came before and all that would come to him in the next few moments? Was it death written there?
The horse raised its head and exhaled a long breath. Gabriel knew the creature was still saddled and waited to be tended to. But still he didn’t rise. It seemed too great an action beneath the weight of the stars. He remembered once hearing a tale in which stars were the souls of men after death and the earliest stars to appear were the most recently passed. Looking at them now, he could believe this to be so. His eyes followed the appearance of one star, then another, the faint trace of a third, then a bloom in which the purple velvet of the night seemed alive with points of light. So many souls. He said a prayer for them all, knowing with a certainty beyond reason that one of those points was the soul of his companion.
He didn’t fully mourn that night, but he knew he would someday. That night, the future lay before him like an enormous question, a puzzle that he looked at from a distance that grew greater and greater as his fatigue overcame him. When he finally slept, he did so with a stony heaviness that was broken neither by the calls of the coyotes that swarmed around him to drink at the pool nor by the enormous rush of sound and movement that was the awakening of desert bats. They surged up from a cave mouth less than a half-mile from where he slept, circled in ascending spirals of thousands upon thousands of separate beings, then shot into the night air in a fury of hunger. When he rose the next morning, he would feel that during his sleep he had traveled very far in the company of a great host of beings.
THEY FOUND THE WHITE BOY SITTING on a rock at the edge of the water, shirtless, weaponless, horseless, and dejected. He turned as they approached. He spat.
Well, shit, if this ain’t just perfect. You hombres know where a man can get a shirt around here?
The men didn’t speak to him, other than to have him rise and climb out of the canyon at gunpoint.
Didn’t figure you did.
The trek out took three hours. At the rim, the boy looked back down upon the river. Damn. He let his eyes follow its course as it meandered away in a bizarre, circuitous route, the canyon walls layering in on each other in dozens of colors and shapes, growing deeper with the passing miles and so stretching to the horizon like a disease eating into the land. The men prodded him to movement.
They walked another twenty minutes before they came to a simple camp. The son was there. He rose when he saw the boy and set down his coffee and walked to him. The son’s face had aged in the past week. Line
s furrowed his forehead, and the weight of mourning sat at the back of his eyes. His lips were parched and peeling. He touched them before he spoke.
Were you party to the murder of Diego Maria Fuentes?
Who?
My father. Mi padre y mi familia. Did you kill them?
Hell, no, I didn’t kill nobody.
The son asked him who did, but the boy said he had no goddamn idea. The man did not believe him. The other men beat the boy for several minutes, and the man asked him again. He still had no goddamn idea, but he figured it might have been the nigger.
He’s a murdering son of bitch if ever there was one. I ain’t had nothing to do with that, though.
You believe it was the Negro?
The boy told him yes. He named the man and called him a stinking nigger.
Now can I go? He’s probably dead down in that canyon anyhow.
The son asked him if he had defiled the girl along with the others. The boy was slow in answering. He said that he might’ve had a little poke but that it wasn’t what the man thought.
The girl liked it when I did it to her. It was that hairy son of a bitch and the nigger that she didn’t like. I always gave it to her gentle-like. Don’t tell me you ain’t never done the same.
But the son gave a signal, and one of the men knocked the boy unconscious with the butt of his rifle. When the boy awoke, it was to a stinging pain in his groin. His head heaved, and the world seemed skewed, and before he was conscious of anything else he was conscious of his own nudity. He was tied down on the desert floor, with his arms and legs pulled taut toward the world’s four quarters by horsehair ropes that bit into his skin. The ropes were held in place by boulders, on each of which a Mexican sat watching. Between his legs was the conspicuous mound of an anthill. It was these creatures that had begun to attack the flesh between his legs.
The boy screamed out, first with pain, then with curses, then with pleas for mercy. He twisted and yanked at the ropes and thrashed his legs, but it was no use. He asked if he was to die this way, and they told him yes. He asked how long it would take, and they told him only a day or two. They watched him with cold black eyes, and not one of them seemed to feel the boy’s pain, or care. They looked at him, then off at the horizon, with the indifference of men who had seen much worse. Two of them smoked; one bit his nails and spat the splinters to the wind.
The insects rose from the mound in great numbers, but they went to their work with a single mind, their pincers slicing into his flesh like the knives of so many whalers into a huge beast. The boy lay back, writhing in pain. He begged, but none moved; he cried, but none even flinched; he cursed, but the men only watched. Only when he whispered a woman’s name did the son decide it was enough. He rode up to him and, from horseback, placed the barrels of his shotgun on the right portion of the boy’s chest. The boy was silenced with one blast, and mercy was awarded. The other men looked at the son, but the son turned without comment. He caught sight of the Scot and the girl coming toward them and rode out to intercept them.
WHEN GABRIEL AWOKE FROM HIS FIRST LONG SLEEP, it was midday and the horse was nowhere to be found. The boy viewed this fact with quiet eyes and set out to find her. As she had made no attempt to conceal her movements, he soon found her settled down in the shade of a large boulder. The horse registered the boy’s presence with a nicker, then slowly rose and came out of the shade to greet him, clanking and sore beneath the saddle.
Gabriel apologized to her silently for the mistreatment, then thought again and spoke aloud. The horse’s ears pricked up. She eyed the boy, then turned broadside to him and stood as he unfastened the saddle and its accounterments. The saddlebags were heavier than he’d anticipated. He dropped the first one hard on his toe. He laid them out on the ground and sorted through the supplies provided to him by providence—or accident, he wasn’t sure which. There were ample matches, a large sack of flour, half a block of bacon, a lump of lard, several twists of tobacco, and a frying pan lid. No pan was to be found, but Gabriel only half registered this fact. His attention was drawn to a jar of preserves, a rich, sugary jam of a fruit similar to strawberries but somehow different. He ate it straight from the jar, shoveling it into his mouth with his fingers and soon feeling an exhilarated lightheadedness. He let the horse lick his fingers.
Marshall’s Winchester was still loaded and heavy. Gabriel studied it carefully, afraid to shift any of its levers or to fire it but staring at each section of the thing as if its function could be divined through sight alone. He set it away from the rest of the supplies. He did likewise with the two Smith and Wesson thirty-two-caliber revolvers, along with the cartridges for both makes of weapon and even his tiny derringer.
Only after his arsenal had been so displayed did the boy turn his attention to the remaining sack. He slipped the gold brick out of it carefully, cradling its soft, dense weight with all the care he’d give an infant. He set it down, remembering how it had once looked like a coffin. It didn’t look so anymore. Coffins were for beings who had given up their lives and so moved on. But this square of gold was not of the same make at all. It had never lived, never breathed. It was simply a bit of metal that, through no fault of its own, drove men to acts of passion. What should he do with it? What could he do with it? He stood above the display trying to think it out, to answer the question right there and have it over with. But no option that he mulled over seemed quite right. It made no sense to leave it where it lay, or to hide it, or to give it away, or to take it home and fall prey to the dreams and schemes such things lead men to. Men like Marshall . . .
The thought sent chills through the boy. He looked anxiously around him, for fear that his thoughts might instantly become reality. Then he packed hastily. Because he could not answer his own questions, he would try to conquer them through motion. He would ride; he would walk if the horse was tired; he would keep up a steady movement for as long as it took to find his way home. He threw the saddle over one shoulder and carried the bags dangling from his other arm. As he led the horse away, Gabriel had the feeling that he was just now beginning his real journey.
FOR THREE DAYS THE MEXICAN, his companions, and the Scot patrolled the rim of the canyon. They ranged down its edge some thirty miles, stationed at different points, searching for signs of the living or the dead. They spotted the bodies of two horses, one floating in a section of flat water twenty miles downstream, another where the waters of the storm receded, wedged between several rocks, its legs splayed out in bizarre directions. It looked like thrown-together pieces of a horse. Its muzzle pointed up toward the canyon walls, so that the man who found it thought the creature was looking at him. They found a few pieces of debris, some saddlebags, and a waterskin.
It wasn’t until the second day, at the full extension of their search, that they found the black boy. He had washed ashore on a narrow strip of beach lining a sheer cliff face. To get to him, the Scot led several of the men down a ravine and into the river upstream of the body. They floated a quarter-mile down to him in the slack water. The boy was lying face down, and the Scot rolled him over most gently. The boy’s eyes were closed, something remarked upon by one of the men. His clothes were all in order except for his boots, which had been sucked off by the current. The Scot probed various portions of his body, as if he might find the source of the injury that ailed the boy, but there was none. His body was completely intact, whole and undamaged. He was simply dead. They considered the trek back to the rim with this dead one carried between them, and as it scarcely seemed possible, they agreed to bury him where he lay. The one who knew the proper words spoke only Spanish. The Scot shrugged and asked him to proceed, and the man did, intoning solemn foreign words that the Scot couldn’t understand but that he trusted would lead the boy to heaven as surely as any others.
In the evenings the son sat with his sister. They talked little about what had happened. They spoke as if they were not sitting on a bowled scoop of the high desert, as if they had not lost the things they
had lost and not seen the things they had seen. Only once did the brother speak to his sister of the future they must now share. He said he didn’t see it yet, didn’t understand how there could be such a thing, although he knew there must be, because the world did not stop to notice the pain of any one person, no matter how deep it was. He promised her that they would find a way, a path in life that would honor those they’d left behind. He promised her that one day she would be whole again and he would be whole again. Everything that was Papi lives on in us, everything that was Mama and that was Cristina. They all live on in us. The girl nodded and said that she believed this. Perhaps more even than you do, she said.
Late on the third day, the son thanked the men for their help. He called them brothers now and forever and praised their bravery and let them know that he would lay down his life for theirs at a moment’s notice. Then he told them to go home. It was over. They drank together that evening, although they did so with the most somber reverence. The son’s first companion asked what he would do, and the son said he would stay away a few more days; he needed the solitude if he was to find a reason to live on. He confessed to this one that it was not as he’d told his sister. He did not believe his own words. I should have killed them with my own hands. I should have eaten their hearts and dragged them into hell by their entrails.
The companion offered to stay with him, but the son would not let him. The next morning the men rode home, taking the girl with them. The son watched them to the eastern horizon, then mounted his horse and sat. The Scot had stayed as well, saying that he too needed solitude to find a future. He sat on a rock. The son thanked him for all he had done and called him a brother like the others and assured him that his guilt had vanished as his heart was good. He bade the man to go once more with God, and with that he moved off. He gave his horse no direction but let it graze where it would. As there was little that could be thought of as food, the horse wandered upstream. The man eventually dismounted and followed behind the horse, like a shepherd with a flock of one.
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