Inland

by Téa Obreht

  “I take it your inability to conjure up Emmett means he’s still among the living?” This did not sound quite like the joke Nora intended. She felt as though she had flung wide some wounded part of herself in speaking, and could not hide it again.

  Josie shook her head. “It don’t prove much, ma’am—save that I couldn’t reach him.”

  “Well, bully for me,” Nora said. “A victory for sense and reason. Almost worth this entire episode.” She folded Rob’s denims once more, carefully, in half. The seams of his back pocket were fraying again. The trouserlegs red with dust. His denims, she thought. Here. His denims here—and therefore his suit on him. Elsewhere.

  “Did he tell you where they were headed this morning, all gussied up?”

  Josie shook her head. “Ma’am, I swear to you, he did not.”

  WHAT ARE YOU DOING BACK out here, Mama?

  Feeding poor old Bill.

  Didn’t think he needed feeding again so soon.

  Well, it was a hot old ride into town and back. He deserves some small reward for not playing out.

  You wouldn’t be hiding out from Josie, would you?

  Not in the slightest.

  Rob and Josie. How about that?

  I don’t care to think about it overmuch, Evelyn, thank you.

  It just don’t seem to fit. He’s such good fun. And she’s so forlorn—and at the same time, a little stupid. Ain’t that what you always say? That God put both hands behind his back when Josie got in line?

  It’s doubtful I ever called her stupid.

  But she ain’t educated like you, Mama.

  It’s not a matter of education. I grew up poor, too. But your father and I took great pains to speak carefully.

  Well. Even so. Growing up the way she did—it probably cost her.

  I believe my word was “inept.”

  Still. It is some feat—keeping that hid from you under your own roof.

  I guess when all your machinations take place under cover of darkness, even the most inept among us can get away with a little something.

  I wonder if anybody else knew.

  I doubt it. No one in this house can lie worth a good goddamn.

  Save for Rob and Josie.

  Guess so.

  Rob and Josie. It just don’t fit. I bet Gramma knew. She’s always around. Always listening to what Josie’s saying, ’stead of just pretending to. Bet she just knew, even if she didn’t stumble onto them some night in the corridor—which she probably did, you know. Given that she moves.

  Don’t start.

  She does so.

  If it were me wheelchair bound, and suspecting that sort of thing, I would’ve used my last breath to let it be known around the house.

  When you really get down to it, isn’t it just a bit romantic?

  Not a bit.

  But still. Two young people, thrown together by chance in a raggedy old house. Looking up at each other over porridge and woodcutting.

  What about Dolan?

  Oh he’ll tear the house in half. Still. Maybe he’ll come around to their happiness in the end.

  Happiness? I wonder if Josie has any notion of how many sweethearts of Rob’s have come and gone.

  There’s been a few, all right.

  Or how well regarded he is around town. In both whorehouses.

  Papa was hardly a saint when you met him.

  Evelyn. It’s not right for you to say such things.

  It’s just the truth I’m telling. Who knows? Maybe it’s for keeps.

  For keeps? With Rob? Ridiculous.

  THE GILA

  IF EVER YOU DESPAIR OF our predicament, Burke, gather courage in remembering that you number among perhaps forty living souls who crossed by land and sea from the Levant to the Pacific. You staked two thousand miles of desert road, and while your horse and mule kin were laming themselves in the barrens and wailing around the empty water barrels, you simply went on.

  Even when we parted company with the corps and struck north, could you imagine the wonders you would see? You have stood on the shores of the mighty Platte, where Red Cloud’s Sioux, gathered for the parley that would wright their ruin, had grazed a horseherd two thousand strong, balding the prairie all the way back to the tree line. You have seen the hunchback yuccas pick up their spiny skirts to flee an oncoming duststorm. When the wind stilled, didn’t we shake out from our shelter to find the trees’ ranks reconfigured, the whole horizon a changed place? You have stood on bluffs planted up with scorched saplings where the ground was pocked with exhalations, with ruts belching white gobs of mud as if the earth were breathing. You have walked the rim of a jaundiced gulch, veined high and low with bands of ore, through which the whitecaps of a nameless river went roaring. You have pulled stave carts and timber wagons and Gatling guns. You have carried ties for the men who lay rail; coal for miners; buffalo bones for the ciboleros; salt for the sellers of it.

  Above all, true to your nature, you have carried water to those furthest from it. How strange that your lack of want for it should make you so perfectly suited to bring it to others. You have carried barrels full of life for prospectors and miners, for small townships whose wells had gone alkaline, for lost wagon trains and thirsty desperadoes. Men half-hung in trees wanted our water, and even the ghosts hoving after us did, as though they knew they’d died an inch from relief. Up and down the Mojave, the Chihuahuan, the Colorado, they knew us.

  “Here comes the Camel Man,” they said. “Here comes the great red horse to water us.”

  You did it then, my funny, noble friend. You did, and you will again. Get on up now before they return.

  * * *

  —

  Remember Christmas Eve in Graveneck, Wyoming? I’d never seen an outpost so bleak. A corridor of falsefronts, at the end of which sat the boiling yellow windows of a saloon. The buffalo hunters had come in off the range to drink and be maudlin, and the streets were black with people. The whole place fell silent when we came jangling into town. Someone, as we passed, got up the nerve to whisper: “Well mercy. We got us a magi.”

  For two dollars, I agreed to stand you beside a manger whose occupant was a cornhusk doll done up to resemble the infant Jesu. And there was Gabriela, the boardinghouse keeper. My own and only love. I can see her now, young woman with black eyes and a dark braid over her shoulder, handing me an empty copper mug with a wink-and-whisper. “Myrrh,” she said, and grinned when I told her I’d always wondered what the hell that was.

  To our right stood a fat little donkey that blenched whenever you stirred or looked at it sideways. Playing the cow was a little buffalo heifer just outgrowing her russet coat. We stood for hours in this ragtag company while the children, with their wind-reddened faces, huddled in the barn, gawping and pointing. The bravest had just about grit enough to put pennies in our jar. Others took to wailing. Gabriela emerged, turbaned with a kitchen towel, to take up the cornhusk Jesu and rest him on her knees. I wanted more than anything to be in her good graces, and said the only thing that came to my mind: “Behold. A star in the east. Mayhap ’twill lead us to the king of kings.”

  It didn’t land well, as we were already at the manger.

  Later, the festivities moved to the Red Desert saloon. A glistening brown goose hissed on the spit. Outside, it had begun to snow. The road into town lay smooth and shining. Some Irish cowpoke was singing the infant Jesu a fireside hymn, and it cracked into me a little bit. I was still dabbing at my eyes when Gabriela brought over the boiled pudding. “And your tall friend?” she said, meaning you. “Will he have anything special for his Christmas dinner?” She looked at me with, you might say, the kind of unabashed forethought that led me to understand I had misjudged both her youth and intentions. The joke between us ran deeper than my tall friend, deeper even than myrrh, and we revisited it later in the warm silence of her room b
elow the stairs. At first, I was wary of my own desire, afraid it would make me quick. But while we whispered to each other in the dark, I found the sadness just beneath my want, like frozen soil.

  “Where in all of Christendom did you get a camel?” she said.

  “Texas.” There was no truer answer.

  “Well,” she said, after a time. “I’ll be damned.”

  * * *

  —

  Life’s happiness is always a famine, and what little we find interests nobody. What use is it, the happiness of some stranger? At worst, it drives onlookers to envy; at best, it bores them. Happiness in love, especially, has only the latter power. One good day follows the next; the wildness of early passion gives way a little; pet names are designated; small jests take root and become great kindnesses revisited in the swell of higher feeling; habits are learnt and tolerated. One’s camel is stabled in the livery, and after a time, it even comes to tolerate and be tolerated by his beloved’s mules, and so on. Humdrum—those were my years with Gabriela: a blissful humdrum that subdued even Donovan, mostly because I feared what the canteen might reveal to me should I give in to his want.

  The most riveting things about this time are likewise the most unmentionable: Gabriela’s husband, for instance, was off rallying round the flag with his Kansan brothers. She had no indication he intended to return—though that didn’t stop us from jumping at every footfall that struck her porch, lest it belong to him.

  With our already meager forts drained by that Baylor havoc to the south, and by war in the east, the only thing on anyone’s lips was depredation. We were forever fearful that the Utes would come flying off the range to butcher us; and the Utes were themselves fearful of us, and we were none of us too keen on the Mormons generally. The town was united in occasionally glooming about you, musing that your presence might draw the eye of a raiding party. Quarrels broke out that Graveneck should not be affiliated with either of us. The Reverend Stanton began sermonizing about the ills of idolatry. He preached that golden calf bit until even the most half-witted of his parishioners understood that he was talking sideways about you. You—an idol. Well all right. And so what if you were? I’m sure you were the chief object of his derision, beloved as you were by the children and women alike. But I was, too. Few of the town’s residents believed I was merely a boarder at the Red Desert saloon. I had also doomed myself by attempting, on the anniversary of Jolly’s feast with the Mojave, to establish a similar tradition in Graveneck. But I was a poor curate of Jolly’s religion: unsure of the day and details of the slaughter, save for the distribution of meat to the needy and the feasting, which the Reverend said reeked of sin and heathen worship.

  “Never mind him,” Gabriela said. “He thinks bathing is sinful. He thinks books, hats, newspapers are sinful.”

  Sinful or not, newspapers were how I came by the only word I ever got of our compatriots in all that time. Lazy Pie McClane, our mail freighter, came by with a note from some sutler three towns over. “Here,” he said, “I can’t imagine who the fuck else this could be.” The letter was addressed to “The Camel Man.” Inside was a raggedy clip of newsprint decrying the tragic death by sniper fire of a camel named Old Douglas in the fight at Vicksburg. Down the page, I got to reading about how Camp Verde had fallen to the Rebels—which I suppose should’ve been no surprise. Old Douglas had been the last of the Oriental charges stabled at that distant livery, snatched up by the invaders and conscripted as a mascot for some doomed regiment or another, until he was gunned down, woeful collateral. On the Union side, offering his thoughts on the matter—to my great astonishment and delight—was one Corporal Absalom Reading. “I traveled with Lieutenant Beale when he first staked the Mojave Road,” he said. “And though the beasts were meant to be working for us, a lot of the time it was us working for the beasts. I can’t say I cared for them. But I was sorry to hear about Old Doug.” Ab, I thought. My old friend. So he had gone back east after all. It was the only time I ever felt ashamed for not having done so myself. But I had no people outside the Territories. No certainty, even, that wherever you and I landed would be annexed to whatever rattlebag country would be left to stitch back together when the fighting was done. So we stayed on and carried dispatches and pulled howitzers between forts and once in a while helped some small, weary band of Cheyenne move their lodges. Anytime I heard tell of some buffalo soldier regiment thereafter, I believed Ab must be among them, back out west and bound for glory.

  The following spring, we were ferrying a load of salt from the Lonewind mines one afternoon when we caught the stare of a bearded, milky-eyed stranger. “You just coming from that battle?” the fella said.

  “No.”

  “Then how came you by this ugly fucker?”

  “I bought him at the ugly fucker fair.”

  He looked doubtful. “You telling me a camel lives this side of the Mississippi and ain’t been in that battle?”

  That scored me good. “What one?”

  Well. What the hell was the matter with us? Didn’t we know Sam Bishop, that maddog cavalier, had been moving freight by camelback from California to Albuquerque when he found himself trapped by the Mojave and a couple hundred of their friends out in the desert? It was all over the papers. They were two weeks besieged, Bishop and his civilian packers, unaided by military outposts and cut off from the outside world, save for their brave little courier who risked hide and haunch to carry futile overtures for help to the nearest fort.

  “They’re out there now?” I said.

  Ah no, indeed, it was all over. The men had buried their supplies, burned their wagons, and in the profusion of ash and darkness, effected their escape by charging their camels at the astonished Mojave.

  All this the stranger had heard only yesterday from a newspaperman in Santa Rosa—which proved to be a small town in a cedar-choked valley only two days’ ride from Lonewind. When you and I got there, a bespectacled little clerk was just closing up the Santa Rosa Crier office.

  “Lordy,” he said upon seeing you.

  Only the promise of trying you out could persuade him to stay awhile and show me the paper I wanted. There, in little more detail than we had previously heard, were the facts as the stranger had relayed them. Mojave enraged by relentless trespass had barred the packtrain for weeks. The predicament had grown very bleak. Toward the middle of the page sat a single mention of Sam Bishop’s “faithful Arabs.” So they’d been there after all—Jolly for sure, and maybe even George, out in the starlight together, huddling against the cold.

  We led you out into the woods above Santa Rosa and you carried the newspaperman up the road, this way and that. I’ll never forget how he looked, smiling down from the saddle and waving, his ridiculous spectacles dropping closer and closer to the end of his nose with your every step. You tolerated this indignity as you tolerate all things, and I was thankful.

  I was thinking, meantime, about Jolly. Had the battle claimed him? Surely the newspapers would give some word of casualties. I found myself tipping the canteen back—but it always showed only what it would; on this occasion, nothing but a cliffside above a stretch of river. So it was left to me to imagine what the waters would not reveal. Bishop, Bishop, Bishop the newspaper said. Bishop urging his men. Bishop leading the charge on a great, white camel.

  What I saw was Jolly, battle-ready, cinching his saddle. There was his column in a little stand of crooked oaks. A light morning rain was falling. Somewhere, a coyote bewailed the diminishing night. Across the field, the Mojave had formed an unbroken line. The smoke of their fires dimmed the moon. They, too, were righteous and unafraid. Then the camels, all bellsong and gunfire, lurched forward.

  And where was I? Dreaming about it in a moonlit wood.

  * * *

  —

  For the first time it struck me that perhaps running had robbed us of something. Well maybe it had. That feeling got into me. It was
n’t Hobb’s this time, or Donovan’s. It was my own. My happiness began to unravel. Gabriela’s, too. She’d had a letter from her husband, this one postmarked from Kentucky. He was coming home. Days were lost to the arithmetic of our remaining time. If he tarried in Nebraska, how long did that leave us? How long if he was waylaid by raids in the Dakotas?

  The afternoons took on a sour glare. Gabriela and I rode you down to the whipcrack bends of the Green River and sat in shared sadness by the stream. “We could leave together,” I said. “He could come back to find you vanished.”

  “What kind of woman would that make me?” Her voice was dulled by having asked this of herself a thousand times. “To abandon a man who has fought for kin and country? I would undo myself. And you would hate me.”

  It’s doubtful I would have hated her, but we both wanted so much to believe me a mettlesome enough man for it to be so. I went back to sleeping in the room I had let and listened to her wakeful footsteps on the boards. Days passed. Despairing, I sent a wire to Fort Tejon. Ali, I wrote, so that he would know me. Relieved to hear about outcome of battle. Am in Wyoming. Send word of yourself. His reply followed so swiftly I hardly had time to reckon with the joy of his having survived. Aware of your whereabouts for some time. Recently an agent name of Berger left here to seek camel man. Enroute Wyoming.

  * * *

  —

  I suppose there was opportunity then to make my life over. I might have stood my ground and waited to meet John Berger on the home plain. I might have sold, or set you to roaming—I know you would have been all right. But by then I was the Camel Man. We were bound up, you and I, in this fleet. Though it break our hearts, we had as little choice then as we have now. Only this time, I haven’t the suitcase and spare pair of boots to sell. But when you’re right again, when we take off, we’ll run just as far.