Inland

by Téa Obreht

  “I suspect you’re not just here to forgive debts,” Nora said at length.

  “No indeed.” She could hear the cake sticking to the roof of his mouth. “I asked Emmett for an audience, and so was summoned here.”

  “Oh.”

  She thought she’d succeeded in broadening her smile, but this was not the case. The Doc watched her. “Ah,” he said. “So he hasn’t told you. Well, I’m very glad to pass the time with you till he finishes whatever he’s doing.”

  “Did you make this appointment with him—today?”

  “Last week.” There was a mien of false patience to him. She could see now how effortfully he’d kept himself from looking around. “I fear Emmett may have forgotten.”

  “I don’t know about forgetting, doc. But we might be passing a while, you and I.”

  “Isn’t he here?”

  “He’s delayed resupplying in Cumberland,” she said. “You know Paul Griggs?”

  “Distantly.”

  “Well, he’s been our waterman these past two years. Only he failed to appear.”

  “My goodness.” A sour little flinch was trapped in his lip.

  “Emmett thinks they’ve a shortage on with the drought. Or that Paul’s looking to squeeze us because with the Floreses gone, he’s only got one homestead to supply.”

  “The bastard.” He lashed his pipe against his thigh. “Forgive me. Do you know what it is, to be a waterman? To be the lowest species of thief. You move into territories where people’s wells are failing and bilk them for what ought be free. All the while you’re nothing but a common freighter. Emmett will give him a firm booting.” He fixed her with a reproachful look. “Nora—why not come to me?”

  “You’re just as parched as the rest of us.”

  “Even so. You mustn’t hesitate to ask. When do you expect him back?”

  “Any moment now,” she said. And then, for reasons not entirely clear to her in that stagnant moment, she admitted, “Though, in truth: two days ago.”

  She imagined the effort he now made to keep his pitch level as a fist squeezing his gut. “He’s two days delayed?”

  “Three, I suppose. If you count Monday.”

  “Has he sent word?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “But that’s not so unusual.”

  He answered this by ruffling himself excessively, like some troubled owl. “Of course not. He could have encountered delays going up there. Could have been delayed waiting on the water. Or waylaid coming back.”

  “And sometimes being in the thick of some great excitement makes us inattendant to the passage of time!”

  “Precisely.”

  “And I’ve not heard of any trouble up Cumberland way.”

  “Trouble? No.” He sat back. “No, the trouble’s in Palo Verde.”

  “What happened?”

  “Didn’t you hear about Martín Cruzado?”

  She hadn’t.

  “It’s not cake-talk,” the Doc said finally.

  She got two glasses, and the Doc poured out a little of his flask in each. Nora continued to hold hers on her knee, as out of range of her nostrils as could be managed.

  The Doc wafted his sternly. “Last week, Martín sent the boys out for the flock. His cousin’s kids. They’re gone three days, maybe four. Too long. Martín gets this foreboding feeling. You know how he is.” She nodded. (She had no idea.) “So in service to his own augury, he mounts up a posse and rides out to find them. He’s scrambling around up in the hills. No sign of either men or sheep. He’s got a tracker with him, a Comanchero goes by Richard Night. He’s looking for sign, but he says it’s all confused—sheep everywhere. In the end, of course, it’s the buzzards that lead them to the bluff. And there’s Martín’s whole flock, smashed to pieces down in the canyon.” He let a little shudder pass through him. “Anyway, Richard Night figured they’d been fired on from further up the mesa and stampeded over, like a buffalo jump.”

  “God’s heaven. Anyone live to tell it?”

  “Not by the time Martín got there. One of the lads had got out from under his horse. But he didn’t get far.” The Doc pointed to the flask. She shook her head. “Those boys were brought into the Palo Verde dispensary after four days in that heat. You ever seen my wife’s fried duck, Nora?” He raised his eyebrows and let her sit with that awhile. She wasn’t sure if it was the bloat of the duck, or the way its skin blistered, that she was supposed to be imagining.

  “Poor Martín. He came into town howling. Said it looked like someone with blood-soaked hands had pulled all the stuffing out of a pillow down there.”

  “Poor Martín.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you moved to lenity,” the Doc said. He removed a parcel from his coat. Unwrapped with painstaking suspense, it revealed an adobe brick of ordinary weight and dimension, which he laid on the table between them as though it were a bar of gold. “This is the brick he threw through the Sentinel window late last night. He’s damn sorry.”

  The offending missile surprised her. She had imagined it quite differently: a rock, something fundamental, something betraying an act of spontaneity, a figure stooping in the heat of passion for an object in the road. A brick, on the other hand—a brick was different. You might call a brick insidious. It had to be found. It had to be transported to the scene of pillage. There was menace to a brick—purpose and premeditation.

  “How fortunate no one was hurt.”

  “Very fortunate.” He shifted in his seat. “But then, not so unexpected. The place has been empty for some days now.”

  “What led him to do it?”

  The Doc threw up his hands. “Oh, what leads people to their most regrettable moments? Drink, of course.” Almost as an afterthought, he said, “But I suppose heartbreak and uncertainty played some part in it, too.”

  “Heartbreak and uncertainty?”

  “I suppose Martín came around in the first place wanting an explanation regarding the Sentinel’s general reticence on the vote.”

  She felt hot. “We’re understaffed.”

  “Of course—but that’s why he thought the letters he’s been sending and sending might find a home beneath your masthead. Emmett told him he’d give it some thought—publishing Martín’s letters, I mean. In Spanish, too. And yet the vote draws ever nearer, and still the Sentinel remains conspicuously silent. Which led Martín to think—and I don’t know, but I suppose he can’t be the only one—that perhaps the Sentinel doesn’t much care which way the vote goes.”

  “Doesn’t care?”

  “Or worse: stands with Ash River.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Is it?”

  “Hector,” she said. “Come now.”

  He folded his arms thoughtfully. “Did you know I was a field surgeon for General Crook?” She knew. Everyone did. “I’ve told you something of this, I think. I drove one of his ambulances while he chased the Sioux around Montana. Anyway, one day, into the triage tent came three fellas carrying a soldier on a buffalo robe. He’d been scalped, but managed to cling both to life and a small hank of his head and hair, which I pried from his fist and was entreated to stitch back on. This I tried with what one might call uncertain results. He always went about afterward with what looked like a smashed pigeon straddling his head. But he was grateful enough for that. We all have our little vanities.” She doubted if he noticed that his hand had returned to his own shining head. “About a year later, I found myself winter-stranded at a depot and the wind blew in a Lakota kid with four army bullets in him. His aunt was the sutler’s wife, so you can imagine words were exchanged, and I was conscripted into saving the boy’s life. Well, I did, and he recovered quite nicely. As thanks, he made a gift to me of a tanned scalp, which he had painted and done up with beads and the like. I don’t mind telling you I was p
retty pleased, for it was one of those curios other people seem to have, but you never think you’ll manage to get hold of yourself. Only—upon closer inspection, I recognized it as the other half of the hank I’d stitched onto Crook’s infantryman the year before!”

  “Good Lord,” Nora said.

  “Imagine.”

  “I presume you threw it away.”

  “Of course not. I kept it. It had been lifted already—what good would it do in the bushes?” She didn’t know what to make of this. “Well, I rejoined Crook just before Slim Buttes the following summer to find his whole regiment taking the mercury. They’d had rather a long season with only a couple of girls, and I don’t have to tell you what happens in those situations. Suffice it to say, I was up to my neck. Presently in came my half-skinned friend from the previous year and hopped up on the table before me and sat there while I went about my work. I didn’t think on my surroundings till I looked up to see him staring at the wall of my tent with his mouth open. After a while he said ‘Hell, doc—I really reckon I don’t know what to make of you. Exactly whose side are you on?’ And then it struck me: I’d displayed the scalp there with some arrowheads and other mementos, having forgot completely that this was the man from whom it was lifted! I knew to overreact would put me past the powers of recovery, so I turned coolly and looked up at the wall. ‘Ah,’ said I. ‘Ah, Mister Lansbury—I see now, the source of your confusion.’ ”

  “That’s a good story, Hector—but the Sentinel hasn’t hung any scalps.”

  “But neither has it stitched any heads.”

  She laughed in spite of herself. “Age has considerably worsened your allegorical abilities,” she said. “How is poor Martín now?”

  “Sleeping off his regrettable night in the dispensary.” He leaned forward a little. “Which, under the circumstances, I hope you consider a suitable alternative to the jailhouse.”

  “Of course. Who in their darkest moments hasn’t thought of throwing a brick?”

  “I’m heartened to hear that, Nora.” There was a gust of obligation to the way he went about squeezing her hand. She suspected he would not wait long to continue. She was right. “In truth, however, the whole thing set me to wondering about the Sentinel’s intentions.”

  “What can you mean?”

  “It occurred to me, while I was in there clearing the damage, that the presses haven’t really turned for more than a week.”

  So he had swept up this morning. Had he let himself in? Had he been able to resist going through the drawers and reading the drafts?

  “You needn’t have done that, Hector.”

  “Well, I felt obliged. I didn’t want it all just sitting there. We haven’t seen the boys these past few days at all.”

  “Really?” Her voice faltered a little.

  “I suppose it’s hard to know what they’re up to once they’re in town.”

  “I came round myself only this morning.”

  “For the first time, I hear.”

  The nerve of him, counting their comings and goings like some fishwife. “It’s a building, Hector, not an ailing uncle. Should I have called on it daily and brought it soup?”

  “More to the point, it’s a wired structure with full twice its own worth of machinery and electric works. Leaner ruins have been looted in Amargo, and in far more prosperous times.” She watched him light his pipe again. Was it a result of his smoking so compulsively, she wondered, or his not knowing how to keep it burning in the first place? “If I may speak plainly?” Hadn’t he been? “I find it a miracle that last night’s brick was the first blow against the Sentinel since the county seat mess began.”

  “What precisely should have earned the Sentinel a sooner blow?”

  She saw him hesitate. It was only for a moment—less, a fraction of one. His last opportunity, she understood, to keep this treaty between himself and Emmett.

  “Hector,” she said.

  He produced a second package and slid it across the table to her. Its heft betrayed it for what it was, an envelope that had been passed from hand to hand, opened and closed repeatedly; been stored in pockets and bureaus and secreted between the pages of books and fattened over time. She let it sit awhile. If he indulged in theatrics, shouldn’t she do the same? Within were letters addressed to Emmett, or else to the Sentinel, and on every page in Spanish or English, rightly writ or misspelled, she found the word “rebuttal.”

  The Doc said: “Different people, as you see, have different causes to feel aggrieved. Some are wounded that the Sentinel failed, or refused, to print up these defenses of Amargo—including the first envelope I sent Emmett two weeks ago. Others feel betrayed by his abrupt withdrawal from the brief and inadequate stand he finally took against the Clarion last week.”

  An unusual feeling twisted at her. “It was adequate enough to cost Desma Ruiz a great deal. Her marriage is questioned, her prospects ruined. Twenty years proving up that creekfront—and now she won’t see a penny for it.”

  “That’s the price of civic life,” the Doc said.

  She waved the pages at him. “All these people would be subject to the same fate.”

  “They seem willing to take that risk. They deserve a venue that will honor their courage.”

  How like her to advance a conversation and blunder right into a chastisement intended for Emmett. It was her own damn fault to be at this exasperating crossroads: side with the Doc against Emmett, in accordance with her own beliefs; or defend her husband’s absurd notions in his absence. “My apologies for his not having righted all the wrongs of the county.”

  The Doc was unfazed. “It’s no small task.”

  “But—you’re here to tell me—it must fall to someone.”

  “I’m here to ask if Emmett intends to take it up. Or if something stays him.”

  She thought about this. “What on earth would stay him?”

  “I can’t for the life of me guess.” He shrugged. “I treat failures of the body, Nora—not of the constitution. Perhaps he is undecided. Perhaps he is afraid. Perhaps he thinks the move to Ash River might benefit him.”

  “How?”

  “Perhaps some offer of enrichment has given him pause.”

  She had thought they were still joking, at least a little. Evidently, they were not.

  “An offer of enrichment—are you mad? How long have you known Emmett?”

  “A long time,” the Doc said. “Though not particularly well—owing to his own disinclinations.”

  “Hector. It’s some nerve to sit in a man’s house and accuse him of being a turncoat.”

  “I don’t do so lightly. But this kind of business redraws lines of allegiance. He would not be the first indebted newspaperman to take the great bounce.”

  “He has not taken the great bounce.”

  The Doc’s shrug was the most enraging in all the world. “Then perhaps he is simply uninterested in the task.”

  “I really cannot speak to my husband’s intentions,” she said. “I know only that my boys are keeping his press warm till he gets back.”

  “Are they? For a week now they’ve not shown their faces in town—while the rest of us waste time huddling on the printhouse porch, peering through the windows. If Emmett intends neutrality until the vote, then perhaps he should consider selling his newspaper while it still has a chance of doing the rest of us some good.”

  She laughed. “Selling it? To whom?”

  He sat deliberately back.

  Here—this. This was at the heart of Emmett’s distaste for him. It wasn’t just the doctor’s “preening”—a word Emmett reserved for anyone who got up a certain way in public. It was the confidence with which Hector Almenara Vega appointed himself as the arbiter of right and wrong. She wondered if he knew what was said about him behind his back—that he had driven that poor son of his almost to ma
dness with the weight of his expectations; that his wife took the laudanum to deaden herself to whispers of all the mistresses Hector had lined up from here to Yuma—accusations against which Nora had defended him again and again, to people all over the county, for the sake of their friendship.

  And yet, here they were. All that talk of debt absolution; all the details of Martín Cruzado’s misfortune. It had all been leading to this.

  “If Emmett returned,” she said, “and learned that I’d treated about selling the Sentinel.”

  “You mean: treated with me.” He wouldn’t give her the opportunity to object. “I realize it’s hardly news that Emmett and I have our differences.”

  “Goddamn it,” she said. “This again, Hector?”

  “Never mind that in seventeen years, I never set foot in Emmett’s house save to dispense medicine—though he has never once refused my hospitality, or my help for the shortfall in his business. And never mind that, after my tending to his wife and children, he responds to the one favor I ask of him by spouting off some nonsense about how he can’t afford to take on another compositor right now, even if it’s my niece.”

  “Hector.”

  “I said never mind.”

  “For a man who doesn’t mind, you seem to keep an awfully detailed score.”

  “I’ve put it all aside, because you and I have been good friends since you alighted in Carter County. And I have great affinity for the boys. It is my continued hope that you might raise them up to make something better of themselves than just Emmett’s hothead heritors.” Everything went out of her mind at once. Just as well, because the Doc was still bulling on. “Now. If I were a small man—a man who holds a grudge and says, Look—here is a gringo who insults me, who holds no respect for my kin, who won’t, no matter how many times I’ve pressed the subject, introduce a Spanish section for the benefit of half the readership in this county—I’d say to hell with Emmett Lark, and to hell with his wife and sons, and especially his newspaper. Why debase myself by offering to assume the responsibilities he is too cowardly to undertake?” She’d never seen a person run out of breath whispering, but here he’d managed it somehow. The top of his head glowed an angry red. “But the fact remains, last week, The Amargo Sentinel struck a blow against the Stock Association. It may not have had much effect, but it did hit its mark—that’s plain enough. And it would be a shame to withdraw from that progress when there are so many people, like Martín Cruzado, whose lives and homes will otherwise fall to the ceaseless depredations of Merrion Crace.” He cleared his throat. “May I trouble you for some water, please, Nora?”