Inland

by Téa Obreht

  He finally found her with his good eye. “Nora! Back again. A head in the door.”

  “Where’s the Sheriff, Profesor?”

  Armando raked his stubble. “Weren’t he just here after all?” He sat there in a blizzard of dustmotes, his thin legs dangling off the side of the cot. “Or maybe it’s last night I’m thinking of.”

  “How about my boys? They come by today?”

  He was an age mulling it over. “No, ma’am. No. No, they did not.”

  Perhaps it was needlessly cruel to them both, asking details of him in this state. He seemed about as certain as he did sober. There was room for hope in that, at least. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he couldn’t even be sure which boys she was asking about.

  “Rob and Dolan,” she said. “The Lark boys?”

  “I know who your sons are, Nora. I’m not as far gone as all that.”

  He shifted to the edge of the cot and bent over the bucket Harlan had left out for him and began to splash his face. Her blood surged. Water pattered around the tin rim and the tops of Armando’s feet. There it was, just two sets of bars away. She should’ve been the town drunk. Then it might have been her locked up, thinly slurping water from cupped hands and—goddamn him!—spitting it out.

  “Where’d Harlan get that?”

  “At the cistern, I reckon. You thirsty? Come in, come in.”

  She tried the handle again. “It’s locked.”

  “Ah, the Sheriff’ll be back in no time.”

  Armando sat there, looking around, his face wet and shining.

  “You heard any kind of hell-raising outside?” Nora said.

  “Hell-raising?”

  “Glass breaking, that kind of thing.”

  “No, not for a while now. No more than usual.” He wiped his hands on his trousers. “I guess someone was wailing last night.”

  “Wailing?”

  He nodded. “A little while after the Sheriff got me. Come to think of it—yes. The Sheriff got me. And the wailing woke me sometime before it was light out, and when I sat up Harlan weren’t here. Can that be right? I reckon so. Where’s he got to?” She waited for him to remember. He waved her in again. “He won’t be long, Nora. You come on in out of the sun and wait for him in here. You know I won’t listen in on you two.”

  She put the chair back in its corner and stood on the boardwalk, looking up and down the street.

  * * *

  —

  What’s going on, Mama?

  I don’t know, honey.

  Where’s Rob and Dolan?

  I really don’t know.

  Are you dizzy?

  A little.

  Won’t you try the cistern again?

  I don’t want to linger around that man, Evelyn. I don’t know who he is.

  Maybe if you head back to Moss’s place.

  Moss has got himself in some bind over there I want no part of.

  Then sit down here in the shade, Mama.

  I will do, yes.

  Are you feeling better?

  A little, darling—give me a moment.

  Where do you reckon they’ve gone, Mama? To the marshals’ in Prescott?

  Knowing would require me to divine what’s in their heads—and that seems past my powers, Evelyn. Really. The marshals in Prescott! After Harlan’s told them everything they need to know, and without a word to me.

  Maybe the fight last night provoked them.

  Maybe.

  Maybe they figured you don’t share their concerns.

  That’s absurd.

  They did try to tell you last night, I suppose.

  They were completely witless, Evelyn. What kind of mother would I be to indulge them in that state, spouting off such nonsense, wrecking the place?

  But you haven’t thought for one moment that some harm might’ve come to Papa? Not all this while?

  I have, of course. But Harlan put my fears down. He was good enough to check the Sanchez place, as you see, no matter how absurd that whole line of thinking.

  I suppose he’s to be believed.

  Of course.

  I’m sure you’re right, Mama.

  Of course I am. The marshals in Prescott—don’t that just beat all.

  It’s damn feckless of them to leave that letter behind in the printhouse, if that’s where they’re going. They’d want to have it by way of introduction.

  Well, if it was Rob in charge and Dolan following, they’ll be lucky to have remembered their boots.

  That’s true.

  My God, what your father would have spared us by writing. All that needed saying was: I’m delayed bringing the water, source it elsewhere or parch.

  I believe that was Rob and Dolan’s point. A letter would’ve come by now, if Papa were well enough to write it.

  What nonsense. “If he were well enough to write it.” None of you remember your papa in the early days. He would disappear for weeks looking for backers or machinery or some far-flung newspaperman—this one who surely knew all there was to know about dodging insolvency—and he would be gone and gone and gone, without so much as a: Are you well, Nora? What of the children? Are you boiling in your beds, or finding water, or have the Apache cut your throats?

  But it’s not like Papa not to send a wire.

  The Apache are always after the wires.

  Bit less of that going on these days, Mama.

  Not so, Evelyn. Didn’t I send a wire some years back, only to learn from the wireman that the line had been cut? He said there was nothing to be done till the break was found and fixed. Said it could take weeks. I’ll never forget the way he looked. All those people’s words, he said, fired off and lost forever. He was saddled with having to go round telling everybody that if they wanted to apprise their far-flung dearest of recent death and illness, they must do it by post again, like the old days. Poor bastard.

  I see you’re feeling better, Mama.

  I am now. But it’ll be a killing-field evening, getting your two lout brothers to admit where they been and what they been doing. The mere prospect wearies me.

  Perhaps Papa will be home by then.

  Good. Let him deal with your brothers himself.

  That’s where they’ve gone then, Mama? To Prescott, to call on the marshals?

  Yes. That’s where they’ve gone.

  To Prescott?

  To Prescott. Exactly.

  THE COLORADO

  WE REALLY SHOULD GET GOING now, Burke, before them people come back. They’ll have their hands full awhile, but you can bet your goddamn beard they’re unlikely to forget about us. We’re watered up and rested now. It’s cool enough. If we leave before daybreak, we could still make good time—not Camel Corps time, of course. We’re not spry enough anymore to be making eighteen miles a day, even at our best. Faster, probably, I reckon, when those green marshes around San Antonio began to thin out, and we found ourselves on the easy brown flats that would fill the horizon for the rest of our journey. I didn’t replenish my canteen but for once, just before we turned north toward New Mexico, right there on the shores of the Colorado River. Those were bitter, pungent waters. They showed me Hobb at play, a small child with the dying sun at his back.

  It was Ned Beale forever banging on about making good time as he blazed the trail from the summit of Seid’s back. As we were in Comanche country, he’d had the decency not to engage a mounted band to play us along, but behind him hammered and picked a roadbreaking crew, flanked by cavalry and footsoldiers and trailed by his ambulances, his mule train, his geologist, his dogs and laundresses, and finally, about two miles behind, Ab in the chuckwagon and ourselves—so it cannot be said that we traveled noiselessly. Still no soul and no water crossed our path for more than fifty miles—save the dead, who watched us pass from their high-bluff caves, or from the ba
sins where their unburied bones were scattered.

  We crossed the Red and Canadian Rivers, after which our road steadily began to climb, high enough at last that the brown sheep with their knotted horns were obliged to click up steeper bluffs to get away from us. Everything was a marvel to Beale. In the sash of his jacket rode the journal in which every detail of our travel was carefully outlined: campsites, the favorability of grass, the features of every lizard and rock and arrowhead.

  His geologist, Williams, was a pasty, stiff-starched fella who spent every day sweating right through his coat. Every quarter mile found him springing from his wagon to sift some curio from the dirt, upturn it meaningfully, and shake his head. Jolly, sullen and furious for having been parted from Seid, distracted himself by badgering Williams about the signs of rock and soil. Was it true, he asked, that there were forests where the gold dust had rained down for so many years that even the wild game was powdered with it? Was it true winter rains washed fist-sized nuggets of gold down the hillsides?

  “I don’t know, sir,” Williams would tell him. “But it is my purpose to find out.”

  Williams was a devil for wandering off, and it was thanks to this habit that we ran afoul of any Indians at all. We had just crossed into New Mexico when the terrain sank into a succession of dry basins, yielding to his curious eye all manner of irresistible dust. One afternoon, we came upon his wagon trailside without him in it. We got to hollering after him to no avail. At last, about a quarter mile off the road, we sighted his pale little squat form frozen at the top of a ridge. “Williams!” Jolly shouted. “Come on back now.” But he did not turn. We came uphill to find two Kiowa stood in the grass some ways ahead of him with their bows drawn. They were so close we could see sunlight caught in the hair of their bare arms. “Comanche!” George shouted—sounding, to nobody’s surprise, as though he might hop down off Maida and fly into their embrace.

  Well, at the sight of you camels, the Kiowas’ bowstrings went slack. An eternity later, they backed their way and we backed ours. Afterwards, we saw curiously few Indians, and Beale reckoned word had got around, as it always did, that we were traveling with monsters.

  * * *

  —

  Who can the people that came this way before us have been? What were their tales? How will life be altered when the camel is as unremarkable a sight in these wastes as the jackrabbit and chaparral cock? Beale asked these questions aloud, all day long, of anyone luckless enough to be within earshot. If he suspected how reverently his infantry took the piss out of him, he did not show it. Evenings found him riding with a small detachment to supply his officers with fresh game, which we could smell roasting all night and in our dreams, and which brought coyotes to the very edge of our fires. It was Beale hooked that huge cutthroat in the Pecos—remember? From the shore we saw the spangled scales of its back frothing the water, and before we knew it, George and I were rushing into the shallows to haul it out. It was a miraculous thing: the jaw drawered out to a ferocious underbite, red sails flared along the top of its back. Suddenly soldiers and packers alike were rushing to the shore to break off makeshift fishing poles. Ab got to yelling, “Fetch me another, boys! Big as this one!” We ranged ourselves about the eddies, our voices flung back and forth by the canyon walls. You camels lined up to watch, browsing the reeds as though you, too, had a stake in our catch. The sun edged higher, mirrored in blinding bolts on the water, but all I caught was some of the Pecos’s brackish soul, which showed me a steamship and the dimlit streets of some town I’d never seen. All day, the river yielded no further life. In our excitement, we forgot Beale’s mammoth cutthroat, which gasped out its last on the rock where we’d hauled it out. By the time we thought of it again, one of its eyes had been lost to some carrion bird, which led Ab to refuse the cooking of it. In the end, we left it lying there, a slab of twilit scales, and went back to our miserable rations.

  * * *

  —

  The longer I live, Burke, the more I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions. This is the only reason I can think to account for the continued presence of the damnable Gerald Shaw, now leading an even larger regiment of mulepackers two miles ahead of us through New Mexico territory, and every bit as brawly under Beale’s command as he’d been under Wayne’s. He seemed forever torn between his derision for the camels—more and more justified each day our packtrain fell behind—and his envy for the excitement you all inspired in the fairer sex.

  You’ll remember this came to a head someplace outside Albuquerque. Mico and I must have driven Ab’s chuckwagon into town, for it was just we three in that strange place. While Ab treated with the sutler, Mico drew my attention to a stack of dwellings, houses piled on top of houses and interconnected with crooked stairwells, the sight of which brought more joy to his eyes than I had ever thought him capable of feeling.

  “This!” he cried. “This is more like it.” Up and down I followed him while he ran about the terraces, crying: “This is a real city, Misafir!”

  But the doors of that strange fortification opened only into empty rooms. An occasional lonely pot greeted us, or the dust of some cold hearth. Every time Mico pressed into a new chamber, my heart quickened with the conviction that some dead soul awaited us on the other side. But none did. I reckon the dead of those people had been laid down right, by loving hands, or were long gone and far away.

  Night had fallen by the time we found our way back to the sutler’s from that maze of homes. Our return was further marred by the sight of Shaw and three of his troops rattling up to the saloon on our camels. Girls were packed cheek to jowl on the balcony to greet you and Saleh, jostling with such vigor that I felt certain the whole terrace would cave under their weight.

  As Mico later explained it, we only followed the men inside to correct their practice of quirting our animals. “With the flat of the hand, sir,” Mico said calmly, though his knuckles were white. “They don’t take well to beating.”

  Shaw had some twenty pounds on the next biggest man in the place, and probably as many years, but didn’t need a corresponding measure of spirits to go from loudtalk to throwing punches. Two seconds was all it took. Somewhere between pinning Mico to the table and dousing his nostrils in whiskey, Shaw suddenly got that maddog look that brings to hand all possible outcomes. He might stand the offender up and brush off his coat and laugh. Or he might kill him. I was told later on that I’d begun to holler: “Come on, Shaw, for fuck’s sake!” This only made it worse. Without loosening his grip, Gerald Shaw turned and pitched his whiskey-glass straight back at me. It shattered the bar mirror, which is all that particular breed of joint needs to give way. Fellas started grabbing each other and throwing fists. Somebody’s arm hooked round my neck and brought me down. I met a boot and a tableleg, and, upside down and arseways, saw Mico leap shrieking into a pile of soldiers on the far side of the room.

  Round about then, the innkeep got his shotgun out from behind the bar and blasted a hole through the ceiling.

  “You been warned!” he roared into the suspended carnage. “Lay off them Hebes and get the fuck out!”

  This set off the shuffling and slinking that precedes the coming of the law. Groans issued from under the piano. Bootheels scraped for the door. Mico climbed out of a pile of limbs and chairlegs, thumbing glass shards off the front of his garb. I never thought so highly of him.

  When Beale heard about it, he gave all five of us hell. “I thought you Turks too fine and devout to get up to this kind of carry-on,” he said dismally, shaking his head. “But now I see you’re even worse than my boys.”

  * * *

  —

  In the wake of this incident, George fixed on the notion of overtaking the roadbreakers. Day after day, the rest of us were conscripted to this cause, mustered to break camp in the quiet dark before reveille, coaxed and bera
ted to sharpen up our packing. I can’t think why it mattered to him so, but I guess he figured it was just a matter of arithmetic. Once mounted, George would ride a half mile ahead of the column, fussing, urging us along, stretching the slightest evidence of our progress. “You see, Misafir?” he might say, seizing me about the shoulders. “See that fella, that so-and-so laying out his bedroll just there? When we drew into camp this time yesterday, he was already asleep. Why, that must mean we’ve gained ten, perhaps fifteen minutes! What do you think of that?”