Inland

by Téa Obreht

  * * *

  —

  I suppose I should admit there were some missteps. We might have done better than that raggedyman circus we wound up following through Nevada, camping night after night beneath the stars. We met good people there, but their friendship was not worth the stands filling with the nocturnal babble and mutinous smoke of half-wild crowds who cheered at the Indian beauty on a horse, and pelted the ring with apple cores to spite the clowns, and sometimes to spite you, whom they considered insufficiently impressive for simply walking the ring even with a half-naked girl on your back.

  “Don’t that creature do anything besides just be?” the impresario asked me.

  It was the kind of question he asked before cutting people from the show, which is, I swear to you, the only reason I answered: “He can lift fifteen hundred pounds.”

  It was my saying that, I know, which invited the miseries that followed. He devised ways to make you showcase your strength. You would lift first four hundred pounds, then six, until a thousand brought the foam from your mouth. The act had little effect unless the jeerers loaded the saddlebags themselves, and I know they never failed to take these opportunities to pinch you, or nip at little bits of your hair. I’ve never been as sorry for anything.

  Sometimes the circus camped on some lonely stretch of road, and then a woman in an apron, sometimes carrying a child, sometimes with her arm looped through a young boy’s, wandered around the fire at night as though she might warm herself there. I took care not to let her touch me.

  Elements of our ragged troupe were always disbanding without warning or ceremony. The half-naked girl met a chinless man of soft disposition in Camp Nye. One of the clowns took up with a couple of rustlers in Reno. In town after town, we shed performers whose dreams changed or injuries worsened, or who found sudden love casting the light a little bit further into the darkness of their foreordained lives. Whenever this happened, I was only able to resist a few days before sending a wire to Graveneck. Gabriela never answered.

  So back we went to the malpais, you and I, and wandered the snaking length of the Colorado, from its floodplain to its northernmost narrows, where the river left us behind to twist between its canyons. I thought often of that water on its unseen course, coming to us from places unreachable by man. I imagined the dead, if they rested anywhere, must rest in a place like that. For they were resting in no other place, and we saw them, it seemed, in every tree, in the streets of every little pueblo, dotting the horizon in their loneliness, the unburied dead of battle upon battle, and the women and children too, always trailing along to somewhere unless they were standing very still and smiling softly at the sight of you.

  Purple sunsets every once in a while silhouetted the thin smoke of Indian fires, but these were fewer now and always more distant. Here and there, the shore was crosshatched with wagon tracks. At the southern road crossing, we began ferrying water again. But our time in this pursuit was diminished, too, for they were digging irrigation ditches everywhere. Now and again, it occurred to me that though I was only thirty, I had gone the way of unbearable old men: talking all spring of the Camel Corps to Mormons and children and thin husks of pilgrims waiting on the new ferry—indeed, to anyone who would accord me the time. The wide raft moved unendingly back and forth across the stream. The boys standing guard at the ramparts of the fledgling fort on the far shore were too young to remember the old emptiness of this place: the blue of distant mountains; the Mojave, those tall river people, the first and last men west of the Missouri ever to face down a camel cavalry; the first steamship to travel this length of the Colorado rounding the crooked current with her wheel shining as it cut the water. But we remembered, you and I. It saddened me. Who would speak of these things when we were gone? So, too, must the makers of those distant fires have asked themselves as they fought the fading of their world. I began to wish that I could pour our memories into the water we carried, so that anyone drinking might see how it had been.

  Drought settled over the valley and brought with it thinning souls. The doomed French rode up from the desert with their brilliant pennants. Small cavalries of dead Indians roamed the old battletrails. Their arrowheads still lay thick on the ground in the groves where they’d fought and died and won and lost. Every now and again some dead brave would pass us, hurrying home to be reborn. They reached for me once in a while, but I could not bear to let them touch me. You might disdain me a coward for it, Burke—but I could not abide it. Their want, I knew, had distilled generation by generation, and to feel how much and how little it entailed would tear my heart in two. I did not want to carry it with me forever. I had not caused it, after all. I had not, Burke. Never by my own hand.

  Then came that roasting July afternoon when the drought cleaved a piece of parched mudbank into the Colorado. Down went two wagons and a tent with a sleeping prospector in it. You were grazing by the outcrop, and were caught in the slide. You scrambled, but went over the lip and into the river. I was in the water kicking against the weight of my boots before you had even righted yourself. I got your bridle in hand and drew you to me. You had that look in your eye you’ve had these last days—reproach, I think, as though this mightn’t have happened under your stewardship. If only our whole lives had been the other way around, and so on.

  Anyway, we gained the shore to a thin screech of cheers: the high banks were lined with dark figures: men and women and children all laughing and shouting in wild relief.

  We must have dived into streams a thousand times thereafter, you and I. Twice a day, when the crossing crowd was thickest, we jumped side by side into the cool blue water while the music of relief erupted behind us. We gathered coin in the copper cup of our old regiment. From a peddler’s wagon, I bought fine tasseling for your bridle. Tied a turban round my head and fit a shining piece of glass to it.

  We were encamped on the shores of Lake Bigler one September afternoon when a pale young man with a thin face and clean hands sought us out. “So you’re a real Turk, then?” he asked.

  I told him I was.

  He was a writer who’d come to the West to make something of its stories. He asked me what I had learned of it all, and I told him I did not know—which struck him as a great profundity. Everyone he’d met had just about one thing to say: the land was changing fast. I supposed it was, but what struck me most was how much of it was staying the same. Lean holdings, miles that couldn’t be made unwild. That vast and immutable want everybody, dead or alive, carried with them all the time.

  Together we hunched over his pages and crudely traced the wagon route from Indianola all the way west to the sea. I had no knack for mapmaking, and told him George would have been the better man for this job—if George drew it, you’d get every crook of every river—which of course got me wistful about George. I found myself telling the little writer all about him, about how he could speak four languages by the time we parted ways, and solve any difficulty of engineering, though he couldn’t sing or play to save his soul, which had always been a great misery to him, one he would have traded all his knowledge of land and water to remedy.

  “If he’s such a pistol,” the little writer said, “how come I never heard of him?”

  “Hadn’t nobody heard of Bill Cody, neither,” I said, “till someone like you wrote about him.”

  Oh, he liked that. So I stayed up nights recounting all I could remember about Jolly and George, about Beale and Ab and the padre in that old wreck on the mesa. I saw no reason to tell him that you and I had never reached the end of the Fort Tejon Road—but he didn’t have such a good grasp of time and never did put it together that we couldn’t have been in California and Montana both at once. I did let him know Beale lied when he wrote our company had suffered no losses—for wasn’t Mico buried out there somewhere in the desert, in a grave we could hardly remember to get back to? And I told him all about you, of course—your inclinations and appetites. I told h
im you were a great, opinionated, willful, contemptuous thing, reserved with your affections but beautiful in your own way, unslowed by age and unafraid of anything. I told him you had seen corners of these deserts that few eyes have ever beheld, for no creature had ever needed water less nor yearned for wandering more. I told him about that time a flood caught us up in a painted canyon and the waters rose around us while you walked until, kicking slowly, you floated up, up past the petroglyphs and the shining, swooping walls of the canyon, and swam on a new river of rain with me on your back, all the way down, so far that when the waters fell your feet touched down in Mexico.

  The little writer listened, filling page after page of his notebook.

  We parted ways after some weeks together, heading in opposite directions: you and I to winter in the low country, and he to rendezvous with his people near the Great Salt Lake. For the first time in many years I felt lighthearted. There was some certainty now that we would be remembered, side by side, all of us, camels and cameleers alike.

  But when I saw the little writer again, he was standing unawares beside the ghost of his horse on the road with two rounds through his back and that curious, weary look of a soul who would linger awhile before he ever understood what had happened to him. He called out to me, but I urged you onward. I did not want to touch him.

  I searched the surrounding ditches for any trace of all he’d written—but I never found a word.

  * * *

  —

  When I think back on George sometimes, I wonder if I didn’t do you a great injustice, Burke, by talking only this nonsense about the dead to you. Riding along, George would sing to Maida. He would expound on the movement of the heavens. By the time they made Tejon, I reckon that sage old girl could count all the way up to a hundred.

  And what did you ever learn from me—save to keep to yourself, and look over your shoulder? My fate was the great, unearned misfortune of your life. I knew only to gather myself up whenever the breaks turned against me. I sat all my life with my eyes cast backward for Marshal John Berger. Even when he was no longer a lawman, even when the territories we crossed schemed and bought their way to statehood, one by one, and wars were fought and Indians besieged on their reservations.

  The hours I must have spent reckoning what I would say if he ever finally caught up to us. I would tell him everything. I would taunt him for having spent his life looking for me.

  But when it finally happened—when, finally, in that camp outside Red Bear, he sat down at my table while I drank—what did I say?

  Nothing.

  “I saw your friend outside,” he said. “And knew I’d found you at last.” He pushed a drink toward me with a speckled hand. He’d been an old man when last I saw him, and was played out even further now. But an old wolf is still a wolf.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know you,” I said.

  “You know a warrant don’t stand unless it’s signed anew now and again?” he said. I knew. “Well, the judge that issued yours died two summers ago, and I ain’t found the man to write me another. Seems you’re unimportant, as killers go. Still. I knowed you was close a long time. So here I am.”

  “I think you got me mistook for somebody else, mister.”

  He leaned close. “I’d know you anywhere—even without that big ugly thing waiting on you outside. But it ain’t your face that’s kept me up nights all these years. It’s that boy you killed. I was there before he died, when they were still hopeful to save him, and had to cut out the dregs of the eye you kicked out his head. That boy took fever and soiled himself and screamed for weeks in his sleep while you was off hooting it up, too much a coward to come back and face what you’d done. Ain’t there a God with His hand on your shoulder? Don’t you feel you owe Him your surrender?”

  “I’m sorry, mister,” said I. “But I ain’t the fella you looking for.”

  He nodded awhile. “I been carrying you with me through Missouri. Through Texas. Through Montana and Nevada. Through California. I wouldn’t say I’ve thought of nothing else. You weren’t even the worst son of a bitch ever to cross my path. But you were a goad to me. All badmen, one way or another, confess themselves to somebody. They can’t help it. Or they stay bad enough to die by enemy hands. But you never seemed to. Sometimes, I wondered if it wasn’t my search keeping you alive. Perhaps, if I could just bring myself to forget you, you’d just go on and die. Well. That ain’t happened. But I know who you are, Lurie Mattie. I may be the last soul living who does. And I will take you to my grave and there extinguish you with my silence.”

  Everything I might still have said, everything I’d been fixing to say all those long years went out of me. All I could think was: here sits the very last person who’ll ever know I was a brother to Hobb and Donovan. And when he goes, whose kin will I be? I looked at that old man, soaked to his very soul with living want, and knew two things. That I must never kill him, nor be near when he died. And that, whether for spite or cowardice, I could not bring myself to give him peace.

  “I’m sorry, mister. I just ain’t the man. I reckon you gotta keep looking for whoever is.”

  Whether he believed me, I’ll never know. When we rode out I glanced back once more at the dreary shambles of the saloon. I half-expected him to be standing there, sighting us from the porch. But he was only sitting in the window, looking at his soup as old men do.

  * * *

  —

  After that, we moved upvalley and jumped into bleak rivers garrisoned on both shores by soldiers dead and living. We carried water where it was needed and filled Donovan’s canteen, and we didn’t care who shot at or was affronted by us, and we did not brook the interference of strangers and we had no doubt of ourselves.

  I reckon I’m trying to say: however badly off we seem now, Burke, however angry and tired you are, we been far worse off than this. And your sullenness now over a little wound like that, and the way you went after that girl—well, Burke, it just disgraces all that. It’s unlike you.

  Remember last time? When that November cough slowed you? You hovered warily over your food, and a strange milky glue gummed your fine old lashes. Desperate, I let myself write Jolly at Fort Tejon: Burke has taken ill. But no answer came. Soon your belly was bilged with outstanding ribs, and your knees had begun to shake. A horse doctor came to rest his ear against your chest. “He must have taken catarrh, I suppose,” he said. “Though what that means, I can’t imagine.”

  He prescribed a week’s rest in a warm stable, but that made no difference.

  “We could try a tonic,” he said next. “Though it would be fairer to put the beggar to his rest, and spare him the coming misery.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But no.”

  “Well, it’s all the same to me.” Before he left, he lingered in the doorway with his dollar coin, looking back at you wistfully. “What if I gave you fifteen dollars?”

  “What for?”

  “For your friend there.”

  “Ain’t you just said he’s all but done for?”

  “He is. But I don’t reckon I’ll get a chance to look inside many more camels round these parts. And you look like you could use fifteen dollars.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “You sure? The whole fifteen, right now. It’s a lot better than nothing for watching him die, and having me come back here in a couple days and get his bits for free.”

  “I said I ain’t selling.”

  “Suit yourself.” He put on his hat. “Let no man interfere with the carers of beasts. But even so—rest him here and don’t wander too far. I’ll see you both again soon.”

  I got to thinking. If this doctor had fifteen dollars to spare on a dying camel, he might spend ten on beggared wrecks who might beat the camel’s owner and steal the camel anyway. And there was no dearth of their kind about.

  So we ran out on that town, too.

>   We had days of slow, uphill road-going. The redwoods were so high and thick their trunks made no sound even in the heavy wind. You walked slow and stopped often. Huddled under the saddleblanket, you lifted your face to smile at the windblown snowflakes when they fell. You tolerated your knees to be dusted of pine needles before we set off each morning.

  I had thought to hide us, but those hills were thick with timber camps. Gaunt men wintered around their fires and peered out at us from sagging tents. From a pair of blear-eyed hardware boys I bought a bedroll and a couple blankets and fixed us up in the woods away from the creek. I’d lie there and listen to the faint sucking thud of that big heart in the fathoms forward of your hump, right between neck and the shoulder. Every now and again, I felt your lips moving drily about my hair. By then your breathing had got very shallow. You had always looked as though you were praying when you lay down. I figured you were doing enough of it for the both of us just by lying there with your knees and fetlocks both bunched together. Praying front and back. For the first time in years, I gave to Donovan’s want and drank a little to see what could be known—but was shown only Jolly, and a small house with shoes and flowers on the mantelpiece. No sign of you anywhere. I bedded you down and wrapped your snout in a rag wet by the canteen water, and we slept thus through the march of days.

  I feared you might grow to despise me for not letting you rest—but wasn’t I right then? Wasn’t I? And ain’t I right now?

  * * *

  —

  I’ll admit I should have heeded sooner that strange feeling clenching over me. The desperadoes in that camp kept eyeing me whenever I left the tent. By and by one of the cookhouse boys asked, “Ain’t that big horse of yours about done dying yet?”