Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

  He spent the day like this, and it was in this way that he came upon the narrow ravine upriver from where the fugitives had entered, beyond the area searched by his men. It was little more than a crack in the earth, and it stretched down toward the river at such a sharp angle that he doubted the possibility of the tracks he saw within it. But they were there. He saw where the tracks ascended, where they reached the surface, and how the lone horse had risen out of the earth. He saw that it had pawed the ground and twisted in a half-circle. And then he saw it move off to the north. He followed the tracks to the horizon. He asked for God’s presence, and then he whistled for his horse.

  He found the Scot sitting in the same place he had left him, in the same posture. I think this is not over, he said.

  The Scot looked up at him and searched his features for the meaning behind his words. He found it. He rose.

  Good. It didn’t feel quite like it was.

  GABRIEL HAD LITTLE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GEOGRAPHY of the western portions of his country. He simply knew that with the men he had traveled south to Texas and then west through the New Mexico territory and into Arizona, all the way to the river canyon where he’d made his escape. As he would not retrace that route, his course seemed obvious. First north, then east. Somehow, he hoped, that simple elbow of direction would lead him home. It would, but it would also take him over territory he had never conceived of before.

  For the first few days on his own, Gabriel headed to the north-east through a landscape that he’d become familiar with over the recent weeks. He intersected once more with a main stem of the Colorado River and followed its scarred banks. When the river forked off either due east or in a more northerly direction, Gabriel opted for the east, feeling comforted by the notion that he was moving closer to the rising sun with each step. It was a deserted country, nowhere marked by boundary or fence line, roadless and empty save for the animal life, for birds, for shad-scale, sagebrush, and the wind in all of its various moods.

  Through the days of silent travel he developed a routine, a discipline almost, enforced by nobody but himself and therefore that much more natural. He tried to eat frugally. In the mornings, he collected the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, as he’d seen Dunlop do once. He skinned each one carefully and took small bites of it, finding it sweet and good, although it stained his fingertips a deep maroon and left a strange sensation in his mouth, the unshakable feeling that his gums and tongue were being stuck by tiny pins. At midday he’d pause long enough to roll a cigarette and sit with one leg thrown over the horn of his saddle, inhaling the smoke and taking in the country. He’d never smoked before, but now, with his solitude close around him, it seemed a natural thing to do. He made only the smallest of fires in the evenings. Huddled beside it, with the horse just a few steps away, he fried strips of bacon and baked bread, a hard, greasy loaf shaped decidedly like the frying pan lid. He followed this with coffee, an oily syrup that he drank straight from the all-purpose lid. It was a foul mixture, and yet somehow it seemed right, just the stuff to fill his stomach and fuel his imaginings as he stared up at the night sky.

  His mind during the first few nights was uneasy, anxious, barely able to dream of the future, alert to any noise not of his own making. A tumble of rolling stones, the crackle of dry brush on the ground, an unexpected movement behind a greasewood plant: all these sent adrenaline reeling through his body. It wasn’t any natural creature that he feared. He’d learned to avoid rattle-snakes, to check his blanket and boots carefully for scorpions. He’d heard coyotes so often and so nearby that they were necessary features of the land, and unexpectedly sighting a gray fox caused him more embarrassment than alarm. The canine paused not more than twenty yards from the boy and watched curiously as he squatted above a shallow depression to relieve himself, pants around his knees, flat rock held in one hand. But no, it was man that Gabriel feared. And he was aware of the irony of being so alone in a wilderness yet so troubled by the notion of other people.

  When the river turned south, Gabriel abandoned it and kept heading east toward the San Juan range of the Rocky Mountains. With the growing elevation, the air grew cooler. Though the days were still warmed by the sun, the nights dropped quickly in temperature. Gabriel found water sources more varied than in the south. The blue skies of morning gave way on a daily basis to a host of billowing clouds which sometimes actually rained but more often than not just threatened.

  By the second week of his solitary journey, Gabriel realized he’d come to know his horse as he’d never known another animal. He’d grown accustomed to the feel of her, the swell and release of her breathing. Her earthy scent was around him always, in the fibers of his clothes, on his hands, in his very skin. He came to know her temperament, her gestures, the manner in which she raised her head at a certain angle to scent the air, the way she sidestepped on being brought to a halt, as if she agreed to stop but could never quite agree to do so on his chosen spot. Through the daily chore of saddling and unsaddling her, he’d come to know the feel of her coat, to find a beauty in the play of the light over her creamy gray hair. He’d run his fingers over her ribs in the evening, up over her rump and down her thigh, thinking of the parts that made her all and completely a horse, so perfect for her function, a tool in but no true accomplice to the crimes of man.

  Late one morning Gabriel picked his way through a juniper woodland. He led the horse by the reins, listening to the progress of his feet and the horse’s hooves across the earth, inhaling the rich scent of the massive trees, and watching the leaping of squirrels from ground to air, branch to branch. He told the horse the history that he had never told James. He spoke of his childhood in the distant east, of his father, now more a notion than a true memory, of his brother, whom he longed to see again, and of his stepfather and uncle, two men who’d grown in stature and wisdom in his eyes, such kind, strong men, so rare in the world. Of his mother he spoke haltingly, as if the horse might judge him. He said that it would be the hardest to see her again. He couldn’t imagine explaining to her. It was as if he not only owned the guilt of having abandoned them but also owned the crimes of the men he’d traveled with. How could he deny that? He’d never fought them. He’d never voiced his beliefs, like Dunlop, or even like James. He’d done nothing to be proud of since his first days in Kansas, and he’d only managed to escape Marshall because he’d abandoned a friend who needed him. How could he tell his mother this and expect her to take him back? For that was what he realized he most wanted now. Just to be let back. To be a child, a son, and a brother.

  He came to the lip of a sandstone canyon without even noticing. He stepped right up to its edge and paused only when he felt a rush of air catch against his face and realized that the land dropped away before him into a bowl a couple of hundred feet deep. He was dizzied by the realization, and still holding the horse’s reins, he fell to one knee. For a moment the earth tilted before him, so expansive was the scale compared to the closed greenness of the forest. But when the ground steadied and settled into proportion, another surprise followed. The cliff wall on the opposite side of the canyon was carved with geometric lines, dotted with black squares, fenced with looping circles and corridors of stone. Gabriel blinked, shook his head, and inched closer to the edge.

  An eagle flew over the canyon, again throwing off his perceptions, placing a distance of a half-mile between him and the far wall. It was a city, a palace built in stone, carved into a cliff face that stretched above it for several hundred feet. The windows and doors of the place gaped black and empty, strangely like the eyes and mouths of people mourning. And it was still, so still. Not a living thing moved in the city; no one walked the streets. There were no fires, no children at play.

  When next a gust of air brushed his face and shoulders, he couldn’t help but feel something ghostly in the touch, as if spirits had flown up from the hollow rooms to inspect him. A breeze swirled around him, and he knew it was no breeze but really the force that remains after death, at least on conse
crated ground. The horse felt it too. She backed a step and snorted, clicked her teeth and urged the boy away from this place.

  Gabriel stood and slowly turned, taking in as much of the deserted city as he could in one far-reaching gaze. As he led the horse away, he felt sure that as beautiful as the city was, it was not for him to look upon too closely. It belonged to another time, to another people, whose ancient joys and miseries and passing from the earth had very little to do with him. He almost felt he should say a prayer, but he couldn’t imagine the words to use and didn’t wish to offend whatever gods ruled that place. A few hundred yards away from the canyon, he slipped aboard the dun and rode steadily through the afternoon, away from the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde.

  THE TWO HAD COVERED THEIR TRACKS UP and out of the canyon meticulously. They traveled through the cover of night for the first few days, as the land was so flat and scoured that they might be seen from many miles away. They shared the black man’s horse, and they left no waste behind. With a dry bundle of snake-weed, they brushed away any footprint or scuffmark that could be read. It was slow progress, but the desert gave way beneath them and they moved steadily to freedom. After four days they came upon a mining town. The place had seen a short-lived boom and bust, and the streets were empty save for a three-legged dog that watched them through blurred, suspicious eyes. They found no people, but the blond man did manage to rope a burro that had been living wild on the outskirts of town, and so he had a mount once more.

  Outside of Prescott, Arizona, the two came upon a lawman who didn’t like the look of them. He rode alone, upon a large bay horse, and he spoke to them with a smirk verging on belligerence. He asked them their business, their destination, their intentions. He laughed at the burro beneath the white man. It was short-lived laughter, however. The blond pulled his silver-inlaid twenty-two from his shoulder holster and shot the lawman through the neck. He shot him again through the chest and slipped off his burro and yanked the man from his horse. He asked the black man for his rifle. He put the barrel of the Winchester against the deputy’s face and shot out both his eyes, shot out the space that made his nose, shot till he had emptied the chamber and the man’s head was a lumpy jumble of flesh and bone, brain matter and hair.

  The black man watched the white from on horseback, ready to ride, but the other was not so inclined. He took a seat beside the lawman and rolled a cigarette. He spoke to him, asked him his name, and apologized for the inconvenience regarding his face. He explained that he’d been feeling a bit out of sorts the last few weeks. It seemed that aspects of his destiny had been taken out of his own hands and manipulated by others, and this was one thing he couldn’t happily put up with. He now wanted to get some of that control back, and the lawman had just been in the wrong place, asking the wrong man questions at a trying time in his life.

  I apologize. I’m sure Saint Peter will understand.

  Against the black man’s wishes, they camped right there next to the dead man. The black listened to the white as he talked on, but he thought of other things, of the past they had shared, of the things done between them that no other knew of. They each contained an anger, but it came out in such different ways. The black man would have taken no joy from the lawman’s death. It was a death with a function, yes, but it lacked meaning. He preferred to kill in a different way, quietly, slowly, with more time for both him and the other to realize the significance of the act.

  When the blond man finally talked himself to sleep, the black sat watching his profile. He had a desire, a momentary, fleeting urge that he’d felt more than once before, to wake that man into pain. But it passed as quickly as it came, and he just watched. There were features the two had in common: the wide, high reach of their foreheads, the lines cut by their eyebrows, and the heavy set of their jaws. The black sometimes wondered if anyone had ever noted these similarities, but he thought not. This was a world that saw only difference, and there was as much at odds about their features as there was in common: pale skin to dark brown, thin nose to wide, white-blond hair on one, loose curls of black on the other. No, there was nobody alive to comment on their bond. Not even the blond man knew that the same man had fathered them both.

  The black remembered this man now, saw his weathered face and heard again his vitriolic tirades in the name of God. To the blond man, he’d bequeathed a tortured bloodline; to the black, he’d given blood but denied it and so planted the seeds of rage. The black man did something then that he never did before the eyes of men. He reached up and touched his fingers to his lips. He parted them and let his fingertips caress the scar tissue that had once been his tongue. He tried to remember the last clear words he had spoken with it, words that were somehow so vile as to rile that weathered holy man to anger. He had been only a boy, perhaps twelve, when he had named the white man as his father. The father had cursed the very thought of it and with his knife silenced the boy forever after. Silenced his speech, at least, but never silenced the anger within, or the questions.

  Rarely did the black man think of his mother, but he did so that evening. He remembered her only from the fragmented view of a child, as an emotion, as a few images pasted together without logical connection. She was the being who defined words that otherwise had no definition for him. She, with blue-black skin, with white-white teeth, with giving flesh to her arms and a smell to her sweat that was like fruit. She was the warm glow of his beginning. She had once been life stripped of all other trappings. And yet . . .

  There he was, staring in through the cracks in their shack as the white man mounted her, rode her in a way the boy had thought was meant only for four-legged creatures. And there she was after the holy man departed, hugging her child to her breast, humming and asking him to forget that which mattered not. But he hadn’t forgotten, and he couldn’t imagine that he ever would. He knew that it was this, at least partly, that made him ask the things he did of other people’s flesh.

  When the blond man rose in the early hours of the morning, the black made no mention of his thoughts. The two saddled up silently and left the dead man stripped of weapons, tobacco, and horse, with the burro grazing nearby to keep him company. They had no need for words, for they both knew their destination. There could be only one way for this now. Once released, chaos must run its course, and these brothers would see it to completion.

  THE SAN JUANS ROSE BEFORE GABRIEL like a great receding barricade conceived by the gods and built of the earth itself. He knew he would have to learn mountain travel through trial and error. He could construct an image of what was to come from dimly remembered descriptions, but he felt surer each day that he could complete this journey—if not the whole of it, at least that day’s portion. He wove his way into the foothills, seeking passage through small gaps in the hillsides, over mounds of wind-scoured sandstone, around tilted slabs of granite. Each ridge gave way to another and another, each higher than the one before. He learned to gauge the scale of the peaks only slowly, with his weary progress from base to peak and down again. He felt minuscule below the mountains, like an ant, a tiny thief crawling over the toes of giants. Thus he rode or led the horse with hushed respect, as if he feared to wake the mountains, and he listened—at first for signs of other people, but increasingly to the many voices around him.

  There was a pattern to the world, a meaning modeled by the land itself, that he began to divine through his silent journey. When did he begin to recognize the feel of the sun on south-facing slopes and the smell of the large pines that grew there? When did he first come to expect the moist feel of the valley floors, or to know the call of that shy bird with the forward-leaning plume above its eyes? And when did he become the person who would spend an entire afternoon standing in a knee-deep stream, watching the progress of a rainbow trout against the current, feeling that he couldn’t possibly move on because moments of pure connection were so rare?

  More and more it seemed that creatures without language were speaking to him. For one full day a magpie stalked him
. The black-and-white bird leapt from tree to tree, watching the boy with cagy sidelong glances, calling out in a sharp, rising call that sounded like a question. Another time he found himself dining with a family of skunks. The creatures plodded into camp like formally dressed dinner guests. They helped themselves to several slices of bacon, most of the lard, and a chunk of bread. Gabriel knew enough of these creatures to keep his distance. He thought a few well-placed rifle blasts might discourage them, but he had neither the heart for killing nor the desire to attract attention to himself. He spent the night watching the banquet from a nearby hollow.

  And there were more frightening dialogues as well. Once the night was interrupted by eerie, tortured screams that seemed to echo across the mountains, gaining breadth and scale with each reverberation. The boy held the rifle tightly, staring into the dark. He could hear a beast moving through the trees, circling his camp in a close circuit that put terror into the horse. It seemed that the cries were those of a troubled soul, a creature part human, part animal, and part demon. He believed it was coming for him and he awaited it. But it never did come, just circled and cried, circled and cried.

  The next morning Gabriel found a mountain lion’s tracks less than fifty yards from where he’d slept. The cat had indeed paced round and round the camp. The large pawprints layered over each other. There were no claw marks, as the boy expected, just soft, padded orbs so numerous that he might have been surrounded by a pack of the cats. Gabriel knew that lions traveled alone. Hiram had told him that long ago. He didn’t doubt the man for a moment, didn’t question how he came to the knowledge, but still he saddled up with haste and rode the anxious horse into the dawn.