by Ryan Ireland
He came close enough to peer into the grave. And what he saw there began to puzzle him. He crouched down by the body and scanned his surroundings in all directions. No human as far as he could see was afoot. He looked back into the grave, into the pinewood box. All seemed reasonable: the grave was shallow certainly; but the ground was hard. There was a coffin and that too seemed reasonable given the vista. At one point in time maybe the scrag had bloomed with flowers. It would be a pleasant place to rest for an eternity. Even the displaced corpse could be a product of coyotes or scavengers, graverobbers. Men did do such things. He’d heard stories.
The second body, the one in the coffin, bothered him. His skin stretched tight, still intact; he looked to be asleep, though judging by the angle of his neck, he was not. Even so, the man said sir a couple times before inching forward. His death must have been recent—he still had his eyes in his head.
The man tried to concoct a plot wherein this man could have been robbing this shallow grave and fallen in, breaking his neck. He shook his head. Then he searched the fresher corpse’s body for valuables. The corpse wore a serape and the man had to unfasten it to search through the dead man’s pockets. But there was nothing, save a canvas bag of jerky. The man immediately ate a strip of the meat, swallowing it with barely a chew. Bigger pieces meant the meat would stay in his gut longer.
The corpse still had boots on his feet. The man wadded a long, translucent strip of jerky into his cheek. Squelching the juice from the meat through his teeth, the man thought of the abnormality of such a crime. He looked around again, this time taking longer and more squinted glances into each horizon. Nothing moved. Now even his mule stood stock still in the sun.
‘It aint graverobbin,’ he said out loud. His voice carried harder in the wide open than he thought it would. It startled him. Even the mule, a quarter mile away, redirected his gaze at the man. He justified the action in his mind as he tugged a boot of rich red leather with stamped designs in the upper off a stiffened foot. Fine things like these left to dry rot, left to feed some roving band of coyotes. As the second boot slid off the corpse’s foot, a couple dollars held together with a silver clip and a pouch of tobacco fell out. The pouch was made from the scrotum of a quarter horse, a tendon woven around the opening as a drawstring.
Without another hesitation he pulled on the boots, stuffing the money into the upper, the tobacco into his pocket. He walked briskly back to the mule and rode into the mountains.
iv
Deep in the mountains proved a strange place. Trees with no business being alive still thrived, rooted in rock and sheltered on each side of the box canyons. Contrasted against the evergreen cover, the soil red and raw and rocked appeared as an open wound, a scab on the earth. Ancients had lived here, people who ground their sown oats into meal, who drank from clay pots like urns. Anasazi people would build their shelters in cliff overhangs and cubbies, who constructed labyrinths of apartments in the sides of mountains. Petroglyphs—their rudimentary form of snaked and swirled written language—adorned the walls in chalked white paint. Whether the original inhabitants had anything worth saying, the stranger knew not.
He wandered through the stooped doorframes of the structures these people made. Crumbling bricks composed of nothing more than straw and mud had weathered a thousand years. The stranger ran his fingers over them. He closed his eyes and his mind went into a dark place. Someday other people would find these ruins—first some stray cowhands, then locals rife with curiosity. Not long after the locals discovered this place, then the rest of the world would come to know of it. Flocking here in droves, on paved roadways, bringing their families with them and no intent to settle, they would trod trails, led by an hourly paid outdoorsman in a wide-brimmed hat and pristine uniform. A ranger—root word range. Little placards would describe what they saw, telling them what men who spent more time in school than the rest of the world gave as truth.
He opened his eyes. Where his fingers had pressed against the brick, flakes of adobe broke off.
The man took the low pass through the mountains. He stopped an hour into the foothills once his path merged with a trickle of a stream. Both he and the mule drank readily. Using his bare hands, he clawed at the soil and uncovered some small white tubers. He washed them in the stream, smelled them and ate them. It might hurt in his gut if they were bad fruit, but he did not eat enough to cause sickness. That much he knew.
On the ship they had thrown their bad food overboard. As part of his quartermasterly duties, the responsibility of disposing of the rotten goods fell on the boy’s father. In good times, it was only a few fruits, a crate of flour squirming with mites. The captain would come to the father’s room—a cubby beneath the deck stairs with a sheet hung up for privacy.
‘Got a couple more need taken care of,’ the captain said.
The boy lay on the top, shorter bunk. Without a word his father nodded. Theyd wait a piece and his father would take a taper from the footlocker and together theyd go to the cargo hold.
The captain marked the crates with Xs. Tonight there were five in total—big crates too.
‘All the foods nearly gone,’ the boy said.
His father hefted a crate, said to grab the other smaller one with plantains in it. The boy did like he was told. Tiny flies flocked out of the slats of the box. The plantains themselves smelled overly sweet. It made him hungry.
‘Doin this’ll save someone from dyin from the shits,’ his father said. They carried the goods up the stairs to the deck. Men were still up; the boy could hear them muttering to each other, to themselves perhaps.
‘Cmon,’ his father snapped. They lugged the cargo to the rail of the ship. ‘On three.’ He counted one and two and they shoved the boxes overboard. First a protracted silence, then a splash. With the boat in the doldrums, every sound could be heard.
‘You there!’ The nightwatchman scampered out of the shadows. ‘What’d you throw?’
‘Bad food,’ the boy’s father said. ‘Rotted all the way through.’
‘Better than no food.’
Another man came up from below deck. It was the first mate. ‘Whats this?’ he asked. He looked the father over, then the boy. He licked his lips in thirst.
‘These two throwin food overboard again,’ the nightwatchman said.
‘Capn’s orders?’
The father nodded, said in fact it was; there were still a few more boxes under deck.
A few more men gathered around to watch the confrontation. ‘You an capn seem awful friendly like,’ the first mate said. ‘He givin it to you or you puttin it in him?’
‘Theyd be the only ones getting their pricks wet,’ one of the deckhands said.
‘Rotten food,’ another simply said.
From the stern of the boat, the captain’s voice rang out. ‘Should stop drinkin the salt water,’ he said. All turned to look at him. In his hand he held a taper, the wax smelling of flowers. ‘Salt water makes the mind go crazy.’
‘But we aint got any fresh water,’ the nightwatchman hissed. ‘No rain since we got here.’
By now all who dwelled on the ship had come above deck. The Portuguese man clung to the rail, ignoring the exchange. The rigger sided with the nightwatchman, stating that salt water quenched better than no water at all.
‘We’re all sailors here,’ the boy’s father said. ‘In right times you know you cant stuff yourself with rot food and salt water.’
‘These aint right times.’
‘That food probably aint even turned.’
‘You and capn are tryin to kill us.’
‘How in hell we end up in this place?’
‘Sargasso,’ the Portuguese man said under his breath. The boy heard when he said it, for there was no wind, no weather, no movement to speak of.
The stranger toured the rectangular towers of the Anasazi village, ducking through doorways, padding up the crumbling steps carved into the sloped rock, making use of a rickety ladder left in place for a thousand y
ears. He climbed through the tunnels. Most of the tunnels were little larger than the breadth of his shoulders. Inside he heard only his own breathing, the shuffling of his hands and knees on the stone, could see nothing more than the light at the end burning white hot. He emerged and there were more ruins. He muttered to himself. These structures had brick at their core—he could see it where the adobe mud fell off in slabs. The ancient homes rose from the landscape like alien things, gaping doorways, postholes where the wooden beams once rested. He crawled into the porthole doorway of one. Shards of a clay pot littered the floor. Scent of rotting flesh ruminated in the small space. In his desperation, he went to crawl through a hole connecting this apartment to the one behind it. He heard the squeak of a mouse as he crawled and before he could avoid it, his knee crushed the rodent.
When he came out the world was again a different place. He looked around the earth, little more than rubble from a tower fallen and scorched land. Touched by nothing except the sun. He cursed under his breath, to himself. Then he began running in circles, his head shaking back and forth, trying to survey the ground.
He cursed again and ran back to where he began. But there was nothing there. The tower—he said it out loud. He ran to the fallen tower and with a renewed fervor, began slinging bricks aside. A small opening showed black and amorphous underneath. What light penetrated through the abyss glimmered at the bottom of the well. He moved some more bricks. Once the aperture augured wide enough, he raised his hands over his head, ready to dive headlong into the darkness.
There he stood, rigid and arms upraised, holding his breath, eyes closed. He released his breath and opened his eyes. This wouldnt be enough. The ancient formula of progress—men plunging headlong into darkness—needed casualties. The ties of the New York subway were the ribs of migrants. The chambers of the Hoover Dam a mausoleum for a score of men. The locks of the Erie Canal little more than a deathbed. Death is progress.
First the stranger just stood by the opening, looking around for anything moving, anything milling about. But there was nothing. Far off, barely even visible, he could see birds, buzzards with their long necks circling. The stranger smiled at the irony: these were beasts in search of the dead. He lay down in the dust, next to the opening, shutting his eyes, pretending to be dead himself.
A time passed, neither long, nor short, when he heard the flapping and rustling of feathers. He held his breath and kept his eyes shut. The buzzard reared its wings open again, danced its sideways waltz to the stranger.
Then the stranger inhaled slowly through his nose. In his mind he visualized the vulture perched on a small stone, its clawed feet wrapped gnarly around it. He rolled and grabbed in one motion. The bird cried out. And they both fell headlong into the aperture.
The stranger climbed through the darkness—darkness so thick he had to scoop it out of the way one handful at a time. His mouth filled with the darkness and he had no choice but to ingest it. Mealy, muddy and rank, he gulped it down, wormed his body through the space. Swallowing the space, it pushed through his throat, plopped foul and full in his gut and continued on slogging its way through his bowels and eventually was expelled behind him.
Then—light. A faint glow of light and he reached toward it, found it to be bleeding through the slatted cracks of the wooden trap door of his dugout home. With a single shove, he pulled himself out of the hole and looked around the interior room. This place was nearly complete, a handsome shelter. He stood and walked out the door to the plains.
He continued on, past the flat rock where he would eventually slaughter the woman and drag her body into the depths of the caves. He walked on, his path intersecting the man’s eventual trifle to a fool’s errand. In spite of himself, he whistled, long and low, an unnatural action for him to take, but a spirit of some type moved him.
‘Fancy seein your likes out this way,’ a voice said.
Before he turned around, the stranger smiled.
The stranger looked back at himself. ‘Cant be more than one of us, you know,’ he said.
‘You know better.’
‘So do you.’
And they knew each other completely; it was true. The one knew what would unfold, the other keeping the knowledge of his thoughts on seeing himself inside his head. But they shared the humor of violating the laws of existence.
‘Only so much material in the universe.’
‘We’ll solve it all soon enough,’ he said. ‘Feel the earth spin a little slower once I showed up?’
‘Saw everything get a little dimmer, knew someone must be sucking the energy right out of creation. Didnt know it’d be me.’
‘You will realize it, only too late.’
Without needing any further cues, the strangers sat, studied each other.
Finally the stranger from the time before asked if he had to be killed.
‘Has to happen that way,’ the stranger said.
‘Cant be rewritten.’
‘Afraid not,’ he said. He leaned back on his hands, looked at the sky, the clouds passing by. Distant things. ‘You’ll understand soon enough.’
Together the stranger and his reflection walked a new path out toward the stream. They walked quietly and the stranger told him how he’d kill the woman and her baby and make short work of the troupe. He described the ruins in the mountains and gulched foothills with the open grave. ‘Goddamn,’ he sighed. ‘It’s a beautiful place, this world.’
Three
i
Food became more plentiful in the mountain pass. Pine nuts were easily plucked from the low-hanging boughs of the trees while he rode on the mule. Come time to stop in the midmorning, the man might set up a snare for some ground squirrel using a length of twine and a sharpened stick. If he chose to ride through until the afternoon—which he did more often now—he would make a game out of baiting the squirrels with his gathered pine nuts. Then he sat on a boulder, crouched, stone in hand. He chose the stones carefully, preferring the rounded ones as big around as his thumb.
When a squirrel came close enough to the pile of nuts, he slung the rock, sidearmed at the creature. More often than not, he killed the animal on the first throw. Eating squirrel wore on his gut, especially when he sliced the flesh too thick and it didnt dry by morning. But he had to eat what he had.
Thats what the first mate had said to his father.
‘Got to eat what we got,’ he said. The captain tried to speak, but the men interjected with nonsense vulgarity.
‘Ever night you an quartermaster come up here, dump food overboard, tell us it’s no good.’
Just as the men had nights before, they congregated on the deck. Staring up at the slivered moon, Scorpio and Draco chasing each other in endless fight. They chanted like byzantines, demanding rain. But none came. Only a gentle lapping of the mossed sea rocked the boat in the doldrums.
The captain held the candle up to the first mate and examined his face. ‘You drank from the sea.’
The first mate drew back into shadow, said he did; it was the only thing to do.
‘Não há nada mais aqui. Isto é o Sargaço,’ the Portuguese said. He limped to the first mate’s side. The other hands grumbled, some asking what the old coot who lived in the hold just said.
‘Sargasso,’ he said again. Then he reached his fingers out and pinched the flame of the candle between his thumb and forefinger. A hiss sliced through the quieted darkness and a small festoon of smoke snaked in the air. No one moved, all bewitched by the old Portuguese. The boy watched as the Portuguese took from the captain’s hand the candle. He watched as the man ate the candle and said in another tongue that all was satisfied.
The stranger watched the husband leave his woman at the hovel, watched his double converse with him in the moonlight, wishing him godspeed. For a time, he stood there watching this form—fully him in the flesh and blood, yet something completely outside of his own existence—just stand in the grass. The silhouetted figure began walking away in pursuit of the man.
The stranger waited until morning to come for the woman. Fear washed across her face when she woke. She reached for the man’s body, but he was not there. Saying no several times, she crab-walked backward into the tarpaulin-and-board side of the hovel. But the stranger had not moved. She pulled her skirt tight down between her legs.
‘Usted consume la luz,’ she said. ‘Vaya ahora.’
‘Hemos hecho esto antes, mi amor,’ the stranger replied. He smiled, complacent and toothy. ‘Usted no puede cambiar lo que ya ha pasado.’
Then she began to cry. ‘Usted es loco.’
Still the stranger knew the path of the man. He followed the man through the night, walking in the tracks the man left behind. What traces the man left behind from his camps—a scrap of cloth, a matchstick or some flecks of grain meal—the stranger gathered and ate.
And though the man stopped for the night, the stranger had no such luxury, for he had no mule, no horse, no train or bus or car. He walked. Sometimes he closed his eyes and imagined what the man saw, what the world looked like at that place at that moment. How simple it must be.
He thought of the man’s story, how much the man must have forgotten and how much of it was now a thing of fiction. He laughed out loud while he walked. He thought it comical how certain people are when they create their stories. Foolish things. You cannot know what has already been written until you read it. And at that moment, it’s supposed to be new.
As the man recalled it, the captain was killed that night on the boat. He called the Portuguese by a name not familiar to any of the men. And the old man walked away without incident.
Later that same night the first mate crushed the captain’s skull with an eight-pound mortar. When he told the crew of this, he said the captain was chanting in his sleep. They carved the flesh from the captain’s bones and drank his blood after it had been boiled.