by Simon Toyne
“We stick to the plan,” he said. “Anyone unhappy with that can get out of the car.”
“And who put you in charge, pendejo?”
“Tío did, okay? Tío called me up himself and asked me to collect this package as a personal favor to him. He also asked me to bring you two along, and like the dickhead that I am, I said fine. If you want to take over so all this becomes your responsibility, then be my guest, otherwise shut your fat mouth and let me think.”
Javier slumped back in his seat like a teenager who’d been grounded.
Mulcahy could see flames to the west now. A twisting wall of fire curling up from the ground and spreading fast. He could see emergency vehicles too, which meant at least the cops would be well occupied.
“Plane!” Javier shouted, pointing back to where they had just come from.
Mulcahy felt a flutter of hope take flight in his chest. Maybe it was all going to be okay after all. Maybe they could turn the truck around, pick up the package as arranged, and have a damn good laugh about it all over some cold beers later. Maybe he would get to keep his nicely squared-away, uncomplicated life after all. He took his foot off the gas and twisted in his seat, taking his eyes off the empty road for a few seconds to see what Javier had seen. He saw the bright yellow plane banking in the sky above the airfield and spun around again, stamping down hard on the gas to claw back the speed he had lost.
“The fuck you doing?” Javier said, looking at him like he was crazy.
“That’s not the plane we’re waiting for,” Mulcahy said, feeling the full weight of the situation settling back on him. “And it’s taking off, not landing. It’s a tanker of some sort, probably MAFFS.”
“MAFFS? The fuck is MAFFS?”
“They’ve been talking about them on the news ever since this dry spell set in. Stands for Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System. It’s what they use to fight wildfires.”
The chop of propellers shredded the air as the plane flew directly overhead, the sound thudding in Mulcahy’s chest.
Javier slumped back in his seat, a teenager again, shaking his head and sucking his teeth. “MAFFS,” he said, like it was the worst curse word he had ever heard. “Tole you, you was some kind of a military motherfucker.”
8
SOLOMON’S SKIN GLOWED UNDER THE LIGHTS, THE MARK ON HIS SHOULDER standing out vividly against it. It was red and raised and about the length and thickness of a human finger, with thinner lines across the top and bottom making it resemble a capital I.
“Looks like a cattle brand,” Morgan said, leaning forward. “Or maybe . . .” He left the thought hanging and pulled his phone from his pocket.
Gloria gently probed the skin around the raised welt with gloved fingers. “Do you remember how you got this?”
Solomon recalled the intense burning pain he had experienced when the name James Coronado had first appeared in his mind, like hot metal being pressed to his flesh, only he had been wearing his shirt and jacket when it had happened and it had felt like it had come from inside him. “No,” he said, not wishing to share that information with Morgan.
Gloria dabbed the reddened area with an alcohol wipe.
“You visited our town before, Mr. Creed?” Morgan asked.
Solomon shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“You sure about that?”
“No.” He glanced over at Morgan. “Why?”
“Because of that cross you’re wearing around your neck for one thing. Any idea how you came by it?”
Solomon looked down and noticed the cross for the first time, a misshapen thing hanging around his neck from a length of leather. He took it in his hand and felt the weight of it. “I don’t recognize it,” he said, turning it slowly, hoping his scrutiny might shake a memory loose. It was roughly made from old horseshoe nails welded together and twisted at the bottom so the points stuck out at the base. There was a balance and a symmetry to it, as though whoever made it had been trying to disguise the precision of its manufacture by constructing it from scrap metal and leaving the finish rough. “Why does this make you think I’ve been here before?”
“Because it’s a replica of the cross standing on the altar of our church. You’re also walking around with a copy of the town’s history in your pocket that appears to have been given to you by someone local.”
Someone local. Someone who might know him and tell him who he was.
“May I see it?” Solomon asked.
Morgan studied him like a poker player trying to figure out what kind of hand the other man was holding, and Solomon felt anger simmering up inside him at his powerlessness. His body started to tense, as if it wanted to spring forward and grab the book from Morgan’s hand. But he knew he was too far away and the nylon bindings were still strapped tight across his legs; he would never be fast enough, and even if he was, Gloria would react and stick him again with whatever she had knocked him out with the first time—propofol most likely, considering how quickly he had recovered from it—
. . . how did he know this stuff?
How did all this information come to him so easily and yet he could remember nothing of himself?
I have an I burned into my skin and yet I have no idea who I am.
He breathed, deep and slow.
Answers. That was what he craved, more even than an outlet for his anger. Answers would soothe his rage and bring some order to the chaos swirling inside him. Answers that he was sure must be contained in the book Morgan held in his hand.
Morgan glanced down at it, deciding whether to hand it over or not. In the end he chose not to. He held it up instead and turned it around for Solomon to see. It was opened at a dedication page, something designed to encourage people to give the book as a present.
A GIFT OF AMERICAN HISTORY
—it said—
TO: SOLOMON CREED
FROM: JAMES CORONADO
Pain flared in his arm when he read the name and again he felt what he had experienced back on the road, a feeling of duty toward this man he couldn’t remember but who apparently knew him well enough to have given him this book.
“You have any idea how you might know Jim?” Morgan asked.
Jim not James—Morgan knew him, he was here. “I think I’m here because of him,” Solomon replied, and felt a new emotion start to take shape inside him.
The fire was here because of him.
But he was here because of James Coronado.
Morgan tipped his head to one side. “How so?”
Solomon stared out of the rear window at the distant fire. A yellow plane was flying low across the blue sky. It reached the eastern edge of the fire and a cloud of vivid red vapor spewed from its tail, streaking across the black smoke and sinking to the ground. It sputtered out before it had covered half of the fire line. Not enough. Not nearly enough. The fire was still coming, toward him, toward the town, toward everyone in it. A threat. A huge, burning threat. Destructive. Purifying. Just like he was. And there was his answer.
“I think I’m here to save him,” he said, turning back to Morgan, certain that this was right. “I’m here to save James Coronado.”
A shadow flitted across Morgan’s face and he stared at Solomon with an expression that could not mean anything good. “James Coronado is dead,” he said flatly, and looked up and out through the side window toward the mountains rising behind the town. “We buried him this morning.”
PART 2
What lies behind and what lies before are tiny matters compared to what lies within.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Extract from Riches and Redemption—The Making of a Town
The published memoir of Reverend Jack “King” Cassidy,
Founder and first citizen of the city of Redemption, Arizona
(b. December 25, 1841, d. December 24, 1927)
It is, I suppose, a curse that befalls anyone who finds a great treasure that they must spend the remainder of their life recounting the details of how they came by i
t. I therefore hope, by setting it down here, that people might leave me alone, for I am tired of talking about it. I had a life of a different color before riches painted it gold, and if I could return to that drab and unremarkable life I would. But you cannot undo what is done, and a bell once rung cannot be unrung.
The story of how I found my fortune and used it to build a church and the town I called Redemption is a brutal and tragic one, yet there is divinity in it also. For God steered my enterprise, as He does all things, and led me to my treasure. But He did not do this with a map or a compass, He did it with tools of His own choosing: with a Bible and with a cross.
The Bible came to me first. It was delivered into my possession by the hand of a dying priest, a Father Damon O’Brien, who had fled his native country under a cloud of persecution. I made his acquaintance in Bannack, Montana, where he had been drawn, as had I, by the promise of gold, only to discover that it had all but run out. He was already close to death when our paths crossed. I was down on my luck and short on money and I took the bed next to his at a discount as no one else would have it, too fearful were they of the mad priest’s ravings and his violent terror of shadows that he could see but no one else could. He believed they were after stealing his Bible away, which he later told me in confidence would lead the bearer to a treasure that must finance the construction of a great church and town in the western desert.
The foundation is here—he would say, clutching the large, battered book to his chest like it was his own child. Here is the seed that must be planted, for He is the true way and the light.
The owner of the flophouse was too superstitious to turn the priest out onto the street, so he slipped me some extra coin to take care of the old man, keep him in drink, and, most important, keep him quiet. Being close to destitute, I took the money and mopped the priest’s sweats and brought him bread and coffee and whiskey and listened to him mutter about the visions he had seen and the riches that would flow from the ground and the great church he would build and how the Bible would act as his compass to lead him there.
And when his time came, he told me with wide, staring eyes that he could hear the dark angels’ wings beating close by his bed, and he pressed that Bible into my hands and made me swear solemnly upon it that I would continue his mission and carry the book south.
Carry His word into the wasteland, he said. Carry His word and also carry Him. For He will protect you and lead you to riches beyond your imagining.
He also told me he had money hidden in a bag sewn into the lining of his coat, a little gold to seal the deal and help me on my way. I took his money and swore I would do as he asked and he signed the Bible over to me like he was signing his own death warrant, then fell into a sleep from which he never awoke.
To my eternal shame, those promises I made to the dying priest were founded more on baser thoughts of the riches he spoke of than the higher ones of founding a church. For I believed he had lost his mind long before he let go of his life and all I heard in the clink of his gold was the sound of release from my own poverty.
I used it to fund my passage west and I read that Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, in railroad diner cars, then mail coaches, and finally in the back of covered wagons all the way to the very edge of civilization in the southernmost parts of the Arizona territories. I expected it might contain a map or some written direction telling where to search for the fortune the priest had promised, but all I found was further evidence of the priest’s cracked mind, passages of scripture marked by his hand and other scrawlings that hinted at desert and fire and treasure, but gave no specific indication as to where any such riches might be found.
During my lengthy travels and study of the book, and to keep it safe from thieving hands, I used it as my pillow when I slept. Soon the priest’s visions started leaking into my dreams. I saw the church in the desert, shining white like he had described, and the Bible lying open inside the doorway, and a pale figure of Christ on a burned cross, hanging above the altar.
The church I had to somehow build.
9
—MRS. CORONADO?
Holly Coronado stared down at her husband’s coffin, a couple of handfuls of dry sand and stones scattered across the pine lid.
—There’s a fire blowing this way, Mrs. Coronado, and I been called away to help.
When the stones had first fallen onto the boards, the sound of the larger pebbles had seemed hollow to her. They had made her think, for a flickering moment, that maybe the coffin was actually empty and all this some kind of elaborate historical reenactment they had forgotten to tell her about.
—I’m supposed to stick around until after everyone’s gone.
The coffin had not been her idea. Neither had the venue.
—I’m supposed to fill in the grave, Mrs. Coronado. Only they need me back in town . . . because of the fire.
She had gone along with everything only because she was numb from grief, or shock, or both, and knew that Jim would have loved the idea of being buried up here next to all the grim-faced pioneers and salty outlaws no one outside Redemption had ever heard of.
—I’m going to have to come back and finish up later, okay?
Jim had loved this town, all its history and legends. All the earnest foundations upon which it had been built.
—Maybe you should come back with me, Mrs. Coronado. I can drop you back home, if you like.
He had told her about the strange little town in the desert the very first time she met him at that freshman mixer at the University of Chicago Law School. She remembered the light that had come into his eyes when he talked about where he was from. She was from a nondescript suburb of St. Louis, so a town in the desert in the shadow of red mountains seemed romantic and exciting to her—and so had he.
—Mrs. Coronado? You okay, Mrs. Coronado?
She turned and studied the earnest, sinewy young man in dusty green overalls. He held a battered baseball cap in his hands and was wringing the life out of it in a mixture of awkwardness and respect, his short, honey-colored hair flopping forward over skin the same color.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Billy. Billy Walker.”
“Do you have a shovel, Billy?”
A line creased his forehead below the mark his cap had made. “Excuse me?”
“A shovel, do you have one?”
He shook his head as it dawned on him where this was headed. “You don’t need to . . . I mean, I’ll come straight back and finish up here after.”
“When? When will you come back?”
He looked away down the valley to where a moving wall of smoke was creeping across a large chunk of the desert. “Soon as the fire’s under control, I guess.”
“What if you’re dead?” The crease deepened in his forehead. “What if the whole town burns up and you along with it—who will come back and bury my husband then? You suppose I should just leave him here for the animals?”
“No, ma’am. Guess not.”
“People make all sorts of plans, Billy Walker. All sorts of promises that don’t get kept. I planned on being married to the man in that box until we were old and gray. But I also promised I would get up out of bed this morning and comb my hair and fix my face and come up here to give my husband a decent burial. So that’s what I’m fixing to do. And a shovel would sure help me keep that particular promise.”
Billy stared down at the twisted cap in his hands, opened his mouth to say something then closed it again, turned around, and loped away down the hill to where his truck was parked in the shade of the large cottonwood in the center of the graveyard. Tools bristled from a barrel in the back and a solid, ugly bulldog sat behind the wheel, ears pricked forward. It was watching the smoke rising up from the valley. It didn’t even move when Billy jumped onto the flatbed and set the springs rocking, just kept its eyes on the distant fire, its tongue lolling wetly from its mouth.
The smoke filled almost a third of the sky now and continued to spread
like a black veil being slowly drawn across the day. Vehicles and people were starting to congregate by the billboard at the edge of town, black dots against the orange roadside dust. A few weeks ago Jim would have been right at the center of it, organizing the effort, leading the charge to save the town, risking his life, if that’s what it took. And in the end, that’s exactly what it had taken.
Holly heard boots hurry up the hill then stop a few feet short of where she was standing. “I could drop you back home,” he said, talking to his feet rather than to her. “I’ll come back before sundown to finish up here, I promise.”
“Give me the shovel, Billy.”
He held the shovel up and examined the blade. It looked new, the polished-steel surface catching the sun as he turned it.
“If you don’t give me the damn thing, I’ll bury my husband using my bare hands.”
He shook his head like he was disappointed or maybe just defeated. “Don’t feel right,” he said. Then he flipped the shovel over and jabbed it into the dirt like a spear. “Just leave it around here someplace,” he said, turning away and hurrying down the hill. “I’ll fetch it later.”
Holly waited until the noise of his engine faded, allowing the softer sounds of nature and the empty cemetery to creep back in. She stood for a long time, listening to the cord slapping against the flagpole by the entrance, the Arizona state flag fluttering at half-mast, the wind humming in the power lines that looped away down the hill. She wondered how many widows had stood here like her and listened to these same lonely sounds.