Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

by Thompson, Lee

  So they came, Jesse near unto death, down the steep grade and into the valley and right up in front of the carousel. The town bunched around them. Dutch wasn’t sure how to play it, since his strategy had always been limited to violence and he doubted such a tactic would work on a hundred grown men. They appeared unarmed, which was good, but Jesse was mewling in the back of the wagon and all the men had a look of determination and otherworldliness he’d only experienced with opium addicts. He about smacked himself, realizing what this was, where he was, and why he was there.

  He did not know the truth and he couldn’t learn it in time. His gun had six bullets. He made the most of them. And he fought with his fists and feet after, until twenty arms beat him to the ground and twenty legs blurred around his head.

  Later, he screamed names—Jennings, Poe, Lancaster—as we tied him to a post and everybody grabbed a rock, forming a long line of men, women, and children that took hours to empty, and one by one we stoned him.

  Over the following days vultures picked the meat from his bones. Some of the men felt like animals and asked to build a church where they could pray and seek forgiveness. Prayer never hurt anyone, and sometimes it helps. And they felt a little better for what they’d done after they buried Jesse. Mr. English, who they dubbed their minister because he knew several Bible passages, said the Lord’s Prayer as the sun beat hot upon their flesh and upon the ground.

  Dutch McCullen’s bones added substance to my entreaty to Lucifer. After a time the rich men went broke, their wives gave birth to stillborn children, and their lives and all they held dear, were as chaff to the wind.

  *****

  Another century went by, and it was around 1999, but you couldn’t decipher the passage of time by judging the physical health of my people or by my spiritual decline. I had been horribly lonely, I’ll admit.

  When the boy I named Peter stumbled in from the desert during the summer solstice, he was near death, I think. It is hard to tell with things like him, things that look oddly human, yet who neither eat nor sleep. Sometimes I believe him to be a lesser demon that Auntie created to torture Jeremiah’s wife, but who was abandoned mid-spell, and thus will always be lost.

  Actually, I more than believe that. I know it in my very bones. He is a spell not followed through. One birthed in anguish and abandoned with self-hate; poor, poor thing that never asked for creation or its pains to begin with.

  He has a delicious and beautiful sadness about him, and it was that which drew me to him to begin with. He skirted the town for a while, but I could feel him, every now and then catch sight of his movements.

  It took a few days for him to build the courage to approach. I welcomed him with open arms but he would squat on the ground and gather bugs to toss to his brothers. His eyes were black splotches of wetness in his face. He may have been unable to speak at the beginning, always making crude noises with his throat, and if so, he learned completely by ear, the way some musicians do, and he was incredibly adept at mimicry.

  I invited him in and yet he roamed for a while, watching people, noticing that they were troubled by his presence, the look of him, the way he smelled like the desert, and most of all those eight-legged children of his.

  Our town up to that point had never had a name, but the spiders had lain webbing everywhere. It annoyed many, but for me, the spiders, and Peter, of course. For weeks there was a crew of assigned men and women who dealt with nothing but removing the webs. Eventually the spiders learned to build them in places where they would not be disturbed—behind walls, beneath dressers, in attics, in basements, in barns and crypts. Someone, I’m not sure who, had called the silk they produced gossamer and someone else had laughed, now that enough time had went by to know they could live side-by-side this strange boy and his pets without destroying each other.

  And things went back to normal, the way all things must, for a while.

  But when Julian, the monster in chainmail shirt came, I had been a hundred and twenty years without a man’s touch. And I ached for it. It made me weak, the nights spent staring at the stars, thinking that the gift I gave to those kind souls in Gossamer was nothing compared to the heat produced by two hungry bodies. I lived for his touch, as rough as it was, so I can relate to the sad, sad woman Brooke I’ll introduce you to in time.

  Julian, oh, Julian, beautiful and hungry Julian.

  I remember what I thought the first time he returned from his nightly escapades with blood on his lips. It was this: The Devil has come at last to punish me for all my failings as a daughter, and as a mother-figure...

  He lied to me when he said he wouldn’t hurt them.

  And the next morning, as he slept and the first of them was found in the stable, my little children came to me for help. I’d promised them eternal life but this one—George Tait—lay in a strewn bale of hay with his neck ravished.

  It was apparent he had tried to fight back but it had cost him many broken bones, their gleaming edges jabbing through the skin and white in the fitful sunlight between the slats. His family wept and they, the others, tried to comfort them.

  They turned to me for answers, and though I suspected the truth, I lied for him. A wolf, surely, had done this. Or a bear. Something inhuman.

  It was partly the truth.

  We buried him on the hill near the church. The first but not the last.

  I beat upon the Devil’s chest as he slept through the day as innocent looking as a child his eyes wide open but unmoving and unfocused. At dusk he stirred, licked his lips, hunger in his every movement. I asked him what he’d done. He ignored me, pushed me away, and I screamed incantations that were meant to bind men and torment them with delirium, but he walked through it, unscathed, and as much as I hated to admit how he reminded me of that terrible cancer, namely priest Longfellow, I knew that if Auntie were still alive she would have known how to resist his persuasions.

  But I tried, all on my own; the spells wound around me like a cloak, and I cried for my children, lost awhile in misery, because I loved them all, and I thought I’d loved him for he was different like me, of darker places, lonely places. But we were so different: where I abhorred the loneliness and wanted to spare these mortal souls such grief that death brought as it whisked away the gentle beating heart, he embraced the pain of his curse and spread it like a disease from tooth and blood.

  That night was worse than the first. And he bled Gossamer dry over the following two weeks, the sun an angry red scar in the sky, when Natalie, her mother, and her mother’s fiancé drew close and offered me the chance to save them all…

  Part Two

  Natalie, Brooke and Angel came from a world of non-stop interaction—computers offering an outlet to express their every simple thought; mobile phones to blah, blah, blah day and night; videogames to charge them with adrenaline in heroic roles; movies to capture fantasies of the perfect world where good always wins and the guy always gets the girl; books filled with hope about how the smallest gestures can prove to move mountains—but their roots were founded in a frenzied workaholic nature that proved you didn’t exactly have to get anything done to prove that you were always doing something, or that you were important, loved, cherished, and amusing.

  It was a wonderful disguise to shield a starving and neurotic core.

  On the surface the interlopers appeared an ordinary couple—the bland man, Angel Roberts, and the somewhat attractive woman, Brooke Pistil—fresh and lovely with a promise that their futures together would be better than all of those that had preceded their meeting, or a higher plane than either one could reach merely on their own.

  For him, she offered stability, a certain, expected future.

  For her, he offered a sexual awakening that had laid dormant, mere ashes, in the decade following her ex-husband’s incarceration. Angel made her feel alive, trusting, and sexy. He was a man of simple and uncreative pleasures at first, but together they had moved into something more experimental. In public they teased each other until the poi
nt of bursting, when they’d find a bush to disappear behind, a closet to occupy, or a backseat to stain with hot juices. The process of trusting, of opening up enough to do so, took the better part of eight months. But the last four months in the first year of their relationship were sweaty, hot, and more unclothed than clothed. It was something Brooke had never expected she’d be able to open herself to again, and for good reason, because she knew how easily those you opened yourself to could slide the unseen blade of betrayal between meat and bone.

  After Angel got his promotion they took Brooke’s daughter Natalie with them and spent two weeks with Brooke’s mother. Albuquerque had been a lot of fun, what with the fresh air, the sunshine, the festival of balloons dotting the sky in rich and vibrant colors.

  Everything is brighter when in love they say.

  None of them were brave enough to ride in one of the balloons but you didn’t have to be up there to enjoy them or to know that they were exquisite. Angel had proposed during their stay, as people around them grinned, old couples remembering their own proposals, wistful women still waiting for the day, young women giving their suitors the eye full of longing, half-filled with promise, that they’d make good wives, that the men would never regret lowering themselves to one knee.

  They stood there, surrounded and sharing their joy, the four of them near the edge of a cliff with the valley rushing out ahead of them for what seemed a hundred miles and those colorful balloons floating like whispers of dreams vaguely remembered but somehow still treasured, Brooke’s heart soaring with them as Angel popped the question and she said, “Yes. God, yes!”

  Angel had slipped the ring on her finger, then her and her mother cried and hugged, and even Natalie, the stick-thin thirteen year old with the stringy blonde hair who didn’t look anything like Brooke but for her eyes, shuffled forward and hugged them as well. More than riches, or anything so tangible, Brooke had longed for someone who would love her and Natalie, and she thought she’d found it.

  They left on Devil’s Night and drove north, hoping to be home for Halloween in Colorado Springs.

  *****

  They thought they found Gossamer by accident, Angel wanting to take a shortcut through the New Mexico high country, but they were wrong.

  This small city lay dying in a low valley, only one way in and one way out, and it with a few other things, struck them as odd.

  It lay in a bowl surrounded by red-rocked rims, lit by a relentless sun, the road off to the right of their car bordered by a windswept arroyo. The buildings—filled with glass that reflected that over-generous sunlight, and built by imported lumber soft in comparison to the rugged landscape—seemed to breathe one last vile and lonely breath. It sent a sickly wind up from the valley and swept dust over their Ford Explorer with a soft, scraping kiss.

  The town in the bowl below appeared as empty as a stage, and Brooke made a joke that they’d driven onto some abandoned set Hollywood had left behind after filming a Western movie. She was at ease at first. She had laughed and held Angel’s hand, felt the weight of the engagement ring like a promise bearing true weight and true meaning on her finger.

  Her daughter Natalie sat quietly in the back seat. The place frightened her, the harshness and solitary landscape as much as the town below where no cars lined the streets and no children played in the scrabbled lawns. It was all the exact opposite of what she’d learned life was all about. And she suspected that though it appeared vacant, possibly even harmless, like forests, old crypts, decrepit blocks of large cities, life teemed beneath the surface, surviving on the life of other things.

  Angel, who would soon be her step-dad, gripped the wheel tighter. He seemed scared too as he parked the Explorer on the shoulder and all three of them stared into the valley surrounded by rugged red cliff face, the glinting tower of a church far in the distance. The stillness didn’t bother him as much as the church did. Even from where he sat behind the steering wheel, he could see that there was something off about the place, as if it was constructed of something other than natural materials. Perhaps flesh and bone, perhaps something far worse. He rationalized it, told himself that it was just that time of year, trying to turn the unsettled feelings into the giddiness he’d had for Halloween as a child.

  They turned their heads as one toward the passenger side, the dry gulch, the stymied weeds somehow growing in the blazing sun barely casting shadows across the hard red dirt. A welcome sign that hadn’t been there a moment ago, Brooke swore, materialized. It was made of old driftwood, plastered with banners in faded yellows, plum purples, blood reds.

  The slogan on the sign read: Welcome to the Palace of Dreams, Where We All Live Forever.

  Natalie shivered in the back seat. She waited for her mom or Angel to say something about it because she knew she wasn’t the only one who had watched it take shape right in front of them. It was the taking shape that had turned all of their heads. But her mother said nothing.

  Angel pulled his pack of Camels from the dash and lit up. The smoke stung Brooke and Natalie’s eyes, and though he was supposed to be quitting the habit, neither blamed him at the moment. All Angel had wanted was to fill up the truck, fill their stomachs, maybe take a few pictures, and then continue celebrating all the good news that had landed in their laps this past year. He knew as well as they did that it would take hard work to smooth the wrinkles that would crop up in their new family eventually.

  It was a new chapter in all of their lives, a healthier one they believed.

  They thought they were ready for that.

  They felt that they really knew each other.

  *****

  Angel looked at the gas gauge. They had about a sixteenth of a tank left. I-25 was roughly forty miles south where they’d turned off at Santa Fe, in hopes of saving time and relishing their good fortune, by traveling as the crow flies towards home. He hadn’t intended for them to be out in the middle of nowhere and low on fuel, his mind filled with the last two wonderful weeks, his imagination forming images of what the future held for them.

  This next week, while he and Brooke still had time left in their vacation, they would be moving all of his stuff to her house. It’d only taken her pointing out the fact that she was buying the house, and that Natalie had grown up there, for him to let his landlord know that he’d be terminating his lease early.

  It hurt a little more than he’d expected. He’d enjoyed being a bachelor. He’d enjoyed not having to share his space. To come and go at whatever hours kept him entertained. It was a big shift, would be, soon enough. But they were worth it, even if the kid was a little standoffish because her dad was in prison. And Angel thought he could understand her plight, never knowing her father, cautious around other men because they all posed as an intrusion to what her mother had once had legally severed with Natalie’s birth father.

  It was reasonable for Angel to assume that the child hoped for a renewal of sorts, though from the cold cast of Brooke’s face when challenged with Bill’s name, any such hope was hopeless. But it was best to let the girl cling to something, no matter how impossible, because it freed Angel of fatherly responsibility, which he felt that he was neither made for, nor suspected he lacked any potential in.

  He glanced out the window, at the church on the far side of the small city. Then back to the gas gauge. He said, “We need to fill the tank.”

  Brooke said, “Can’t we try father up the road?” The easiness with their situation she’d projected a moment ago, when they’d first stopped, had evaporated. Angel found it curious, but there wasn’t a whole lot of time to dwell on it, his mind turning to how quickly the remaining fuel would burn and how important it was that it didn’t. Without the air conditioning, without a cooler of water and snacks, their chances of survival slimmed considerably. Not exactly the best way to step into the role he figured he was supposed to, of the capable man who would plan and fight to protect them. But he was neither fighter nor planner, knew and accepted it, which only made it all the more difficult
to fake it.

  Angel shook his head, said, “I wish, but we’re not going to make it far.”

  Natalie said from the back seat, “There’s not even any cars moving down there. I don’t even see a car.”

  Brooke kept quiet, possibly not wanting to think about it when she had to do more thinking on her job in a year than most people had to do in their entire life. But Angel had heard Natalie and he thought she was right. There weren’t any vehicles that he could see driving the narrow dirt roads let alone parked along the streets. He wondered if this place was so far behind the rest of the world that they didn’t even have cars. He knew there still had to be communities like that somewhere. He remembered that the Amish, or Mormons, or Mennonites, somewhere were like that. Whichever group it was he thought they were crazy for clinging so desperately to the past. It seemed a very stubborn way of life, though secretly, he longed for such simplicity.

  Angel stared at Gossamer lying low and still in the valley. The sunlight glaring off all the windows of a few hundred abandoned houses hurt his eyes. He shook his head, looked away, said, “We’ll have to go down there. I’m sorry, okay? I know I should have filled up miles back.”

  Natalie said, “You think?”

  Brooke turned and gave her a look. Angel watched Natalie in the rearview shrug, lower her head, heard her say, “What? It’s true.”

  “She’s right,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”