Inland

by Téa Obreht

  What else was there to do, save follow you and keep on calling?

  I can’t say how long we’ve been adrift like this together. Long enough for you to grow white with age, anyway, and for the chollas stuck to your legs and sides to sink their roots in you and begin to grow. For birds to nest and hatch and die and fledge in the hollows of my coat. The dead, I know, must be all around us, though I’ve never seen them. I’ve seen only the living in their distant towns, whose yellow lights, once so sparse, have brightened more and more of our black nights. It made me mournful to see them. Somewhere, in just such a town, Jolly was growing old. Perhaps with Trudie still at his side; Amelia, too, and other children, whose faceless forms hurried around the house I found myself less and less able to remember. Perhaps my friend had gone home believing me a victim of my old way; running on, as I always had. Or perhaps he felt my absence, as you did, and spoke of me now as a man of the past. Perhaps to his children. Or perhaps to George, who by now must surely have come through from California to sit at Jolly’s hearth and call me by name into the midst of my living brothers.

  Of this I’m certain: if the Jolly I know still breathes, he does so believing you and I might ride into town at any moment, and some small door of his soul is forever open to us. I’ve never quite left off thinking we might stumble through it after all.

  But you’ve been too wary for people. For many years now you’ve stayed hid among the trees, or vanished yourself against the pale, bald hills at the first sign of passing riders.

  I’ll admit, Burke, that sometimes when the sandstorms cast their great, roaring clouds around us, and the grinning moon spun away into the dark, I have wondered if we mightn’t both be wandering a world devoid of anyone but ourselves. A man gets lost inward, going so many years unremarked-upon and unseen. It’s hardly reassurance enough to skirt a camp every once in awhile and see the dogs sit up and come to the fire’s edge and bark at our passing. We did once cross the path of a prospector, who dropped his shovel and fled. And he did reappear a few days later with a carrot and a length of rope, and a slurry of soft words you only withstood for a little while before backing into the thicket.

  He wouldn’t give up, that fella. Kept dogging us for days, and it took you losing your temper and rushing him to finally put him off our trail for good.

  Of course, that taught you to rush anyone coming within a half mile of you—miners, mules, that poor girl and the people who came for her—but I’ll admit I was pleased to see him go. For a torn moment I’d feared he might cut me away from you, and that you would go on toward his life, leaving me behind in the desert alone. It set me thinking that coming up on Jolly might not be so bright a day after all. Oh, he’d recognize us, to be sure, and be relieved to have some old questions put to rest. But there would still be unknowns. The full truth of what had come to pass would always elude him. And what could Jolly do for us any different than what a stranger might? Free you of me. Pull us apart. And then what? He might not shoot you for sport, nor hang your head above his door. But having weighed the extent of your diminishment, he would put you down. Bloodlust or mercy, the result would be the same: with both of us dead, we would wander alone, each unable to find the other again.

  The dread of this has sheltered in me for a long time—though never quite as badly as now, Burke. Of course, I know you won’t live forever. Though to me you remain the handsomest old man on four legs, I see those clouds in your eyes, and that sag in your hump. I know the hitch in your step has worsened. All summer long, you’ve moved from dry wash to dry wash till we found ourselves back at the redrock wastes we first crossed so many decades ago. Even before that woman shot at you from the window, the drought had all but hollowed you out.

  But every day we go on is home.

  Why else would I go so long without answering the girl? Wasn’t hers the only human voice to call out to me in all these twenty long years, back when she first touched the edges of my mind and said, “Who are you?” And when I didn’t answer, “Are you lost?”

  She looked without seeing me, but I could feel the press of her unquiet mind. All kinds of things gusting around in there—fear and love and melancholy. “Do you know you’re among the other living?” she said.

  “I know,” was all I ever told her.

  But she wouldn’t be satisfied. She pressed me about my name, my demise. How long had I been wandering? I couldn’t bring myself to answer, for by that time you were damn near played out, and I feared she might break into me and see the truth, see us bedding down in that abandoned house at the top of the mesa; see us making our way, night after wretched night, around the outbuildings and down to the dead creek in the hope some faraway rain might have thickened it.

  We should’ve stayed put and not gone off looking for water. What little you found over at that other place was not worth getting shot for—and anyway, hadn’t there been water all along, right up here, in the springhouse? All you had to do was heed me, and wait awhile longer for them all to disperse. For the girl to stop feeling around with her mind, and the men to ride down to the wash and away from us in the moonlight—and all the dogs with them, in the bargain, and you free to drink to your heart’s content, unheard and uninterrupted.

  No matter. A few more hours and you’ll be right enough to go on again. You’ll see.

  “But, Lurie,” you’d say to me now, “why are you pressing me onward, when not two hours gone, you told me you had changed your mind? Before the girl showed up and called out to you again, hadn’t you come around to my way of thinking? Hadn’t you just got done telling me how shot up and old and played out I am, and how my pain wounds you worse than any fear you may yet carry—and that it was perhaps time, having borne the wants of so many, to heed your own? Hadn’t you wanted to let me rest?”

  And then I’d say to you, “That was last night, Burke. Now all is changed.”

  And you’d find me with that long-dead stare. “How so, Misafir? How has it changed?”

  “Well,” I’d say. “What about the girl? Ain’t you just put down the one solitary soul might’ve helped us, understood what we were asking? I feel more lost than ever now.”

  And you would say, “Don’t feel lost, Misafir.”

  “But who will put us down together, Burke, now that the girl cannot?”

  And you would say, “We’ll find us someone, Lurie. I don’t doubt we will.”

  MORNING

  AMARGO

  Arizona Territory, 1893

  THE CAMEL STAGGERED ALONG ON joints that seemed to fold in all the wrong directions. Out in the open now, dusted red and drenched in sunlight. Its hair, all but invisible between the overgrowth and the distintegrating adornments, was white—thin and iridescent, as if each strand were a single thread of glass. What Nora had mistaken for shadow back while it was still among the trees was in truth a wide band of blood and shot blackening its right flank and tightening its stride, so that it rolled forward arhythmically, pausing to rest the dragging leg and breathe through the foam around its mouth. It had come all the way down the hill like this, and was almost in the yard. Every once in a while it seemed to find her with its ancient, gray-fogged eyes, but it was clear enough now that it looked without seeing.

  If it had hands, she thought, it would be feeling its way along.

  Mama, Evelyn said.

  In later years, she would remember wondering where her fear had gone. There had been no dearth of it in the gulch last night, and that was before she had taken full measure of this bedraggled mountain, this overgrown wonderment and its shriveled, grinning rider.

  An old and sudden sorrow joined her instead. She felt it arrive as though some distant friend, long unseen, were calling from just outside the house, and she need only go toward that familiar voice and open the door. Its spell changed her sight, and the impregnable morass of cloth and brush that burdened the animal as it came toward her seemed not only know
able, but familiar. She knew the reins, their weight and texture, the sharp way they frayed between the fingers. She knew the bewildering topography of that hump, the warmth rising off the saddle. The flat cool of the few discs still dancing along the bridle. She wanted—what? Her vision blurred. She wanted to be here always. She wanted never to be here again.

  The wind shifted, and the camel’s sulfurous pungency astounded her. Moments later it astounded poor old Bill, who thrashed free of his lead-rope and went screaming across the corral. This was when Toby finally lowered his stereoscope.

  “Don’t turn around, Tobe.”

  “Why, Mama?”

  “Keep on looking at your pictures.”

  At the sound of her voice, the camel stilled. One thick, tattered foot lifted and thumped back down. Slight spasms jerked its head left and right. It couldn’t quite get a fix on where she stood. Its sides distended and fell. She was counting its breaths, and had got up to six, when she realized she had moved up the porch and was already easing the shotgun from behind the chair. Its heft felt foreign, odd. She broke it open.

  Toby heard it snap back into place.

  “What’s happening, Mama?”

  But he stayed obediently behind the stereoscope, in that pale half-world across the sea, or under some dazzling archway, while she stood out here in her yard, in the sun, in this daze, and brought the rifle up.

  “Stay as you are, Tobe.”

  She was a poor shot. Always had been. If she missed, the camel might trample Toby on its way to her. Why, then, was she aware, through a scrim of feeling that seemed not entirely her own, that her foremost fear was not for her son, sitting here in the dirt with his back to the beast that wandered his dreams; nor for Josie, whom it had already overwhelmed? In the path of what should have been her terror was another, broader, more urgent one: that the camel, if she failed to hit it, might find itself ongoing. Veer off into the woods and disappear again, as it had before. This time must be different. The sorrow of its suffering journey—what the hell did she know of its suffering journey?—rushed into her like a dream of the abyss. There was nothing at the bottom.

  She fired. A spurt went up at the junction of neck and shoulder, but the bullet was slow to wake that numb, ancient flesh. Then it stung, and the camel reeled back half a pace, tack singing, and turned her way. It took one, two, three impossibly long strides, and then came thunderously down onto its knees and fell forward. A detonation of dust lifted from its back, like afterquake shale leaving a mountainside, and went on purling.

  Toby sat frozen with the stereoscope still pressed over his eyes. “What is it, Mama?” He began to cry.

  She was crying herself. After a while, she gave over trying to take the stereoscope from him and left him sitting there in the dust and went up the slope to where the camel had fallen. Huge, jellied ticks had left craters in its hair. Paste from its thick-lashed eyes had run black rivers down the sides of its face.

  The dead man’s coat was buttoned and crusted stiff. Below the rotted throat clasp she could see slim yellow rib bones, with their sheath of petrified skin, disappearing into darkness. Mattings, which she realized were hair, lay glued back against the saddle. One of the hands and its opposite foot were missing. The rest was contained in the ropes in more or less the same configuration as had been ordained by life.

  “What is it, Mama?” Toby was still sitting with his back to her.

  “Come and see.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He felt his way up toward her with his eyes shut tight. Every so often, he pressed a closed fist against them as though he wanted to sear even the possibility of whatever lay there from his vision.

  “It’s a camel, Tobe.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A huge horse. Just as you said.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Open your eyes, then.”

  “It smells awful.”

  “It was very old, I think.”

  She tried to coax him closer, but he continued to hang back with his elbow crooked over his eyes. Finally she took his hand and led him, little by little, to where the huge head lay in the sage. She lowered his open palm into the soft, thick curls of its brow.

  “Is it real?” he said.

  “Sure is.”

  Toby’s fingers found the ears and the thick orbital protrusions above the eyes. “What’s it doing here?”

  “I really don’t know. I think it must have come a very long way.”

  He would only agree to look at it after he’d gone inside and climbed upstairs and was safely standing in the window of Rob’s room. Nora shaded her eyes to look up at him. She could see his little head behind the glass, and now she could see him from within the room, from behind, standing on tiptoe amid the wreckage that was Rob, amid the wood shavings and the thrown-about shirts, as though all the deluge of Rob’s old life was now watching Toby unlatch the window.

  He leaned out and made a face. “It don’t look anything like they do in the books.”

  “Well,” she said. “They never do.”

  “What’s that on its back, Mama?”

  “A saddle,” she said.

  From this distance, the rider must be just a blur to him. Toby leaned his bald head against the windowframe. She could see him standing there ten years from now, Rob’s height or maybe a little taller. If they stayed—if she gave Crace way, and the boys were allowed to return—he would want this room for his own one day so that he could look out and be reminded of this sight, his mother standing over this odd and impossible kill, the strangest thing ever to happen in his life made all the more precious because his brothers had missed it, and in no time at all he would be its only living keeper.

  Toby pointed to the road. “I think I see the Doc coming.”

  “Good. You get your Gramma fed and presentable.”

  When Toby disappeared from the window, she turned back to the dead man.

  What was she meant to do with him? All the certainty of the last few minutes had gone out of her. Nothing had replaced it. Then she thought of Emmett laid up in some vast, forsaken gulch, with the sky cloudless overhead and the birds already gone from him, waiting for some stranger to open his coat and ask the contents of his life—who was he? To whom did he belong? And the answer, necessarily, would come: to somebody unknown. Might as well be nobody.

  She opened her knife and began cutting the ropes away. The rider fell out of his bonds in pieces: the shin and thighbone sliding out, one after the other. His trouserlegs were white with bird droppings, and ragged with long-ago monsoons. As she cut, the man’s hand slid out of its pocket and crumbled, and she marked the tips of his fingers so she would know where they had fallen when she returned later to gather him up.

  The Doc was rounding the bend, the red dust of his horses rising constantly in twin plumes as his wheels churned the road. He would be at her door in a matter of minutes. He would rein up and ease himself out of the boxseat, pretending they had not, for a moment yesterday, become strangers. Pretending, perhaps, that nothing on his mind needed answering. He would follow silently along when she led him into the barn, where his coldness would fall away. And once Josie was safely upstairs, they would turn to this new, impossible task together, working through the day, through all the Doc’s exclamations and conjectures, till the sun went down, by which time he would certainly have grown impatient enough to return to the question of the newspaper. What would her answer be tonight? He would not ask her a third time.

  When the ropes were all cut, she took the coat by its lapels and dragged what remained of the rider out of the saddle and onto the ground. A woodland of pine needles and sap stained the empty seat. She could see the saddle panels laidbare by the body’s vacancy. They were glossy, as though someone had spent a lifetime polishing them. She unbuttoned his coat and the stained yellow lin
ens of his shirt beneath. He was there—or most of him, anyway. Dry skin stretched like bandaging. One hand, one arm. The hollow turnkey bones of his pelvis.

  Straightening up made her dizzy. She felt the sudden want for rest.

  The dead man’s pockets were empty. In the saddlebag she found only a mess of waterlogged papers whose words had pooled along the pagebottoms in brown and yellow fans a lifetime ago. He wore no tags, no jewelry.

  Strapped over what remained of the saddlehorn was a tin canteen, marked with the crossbraces of some nameless legion. When she pulled it loose she heard—the strangest thing—the singing tumble of water.

  The cap held firm awhile, but crumbled eventually between her fingers. She had merely intended to satisfy her disbelief. Just a little water flashed against the black insides, but, yes, there it was—singing in the darkness. Rain and river. Iron and salt. How many years, she wondered, had it been carried along? She shook it, and it sang again. Brightly, cleanly around its course. Somewhere behind and above her, Toby was asking a question. She had no answer. She had no answer yet, but she put the canteen to her mouth and saw, yes—a house; their house and its mesa, their stream and its water, and seas; seas and chimneys; the distant funnel of a greenblack hurricane; coins, buttons, buckles, dizzy blue beads and this canteen; this canteen, and this camel, and Coyote in his winter coat; a long unbroken road, a line of misshapen shadows, and men all around laughing at, no, laughing with each other, laughing around the fire, resting on their camels; a girl, small, thin-legged child of the desert, with her hand outheld; and water—the roar of rivers leaving their canyons, rushing over land, over cliff, over the thicksalted bed of some strange dark sea; and now her house again; camel and rider side by side in the brush, folded side by side in a deep trench—no, grave; both in the grave together, and the blinding flash of a camera; passersby shouting, “hey is this the place?”; yes, this is the place; this is the place—until it isn’t; her house—until it isn’t; no water and therefore no house, no paper, no town at all, one way or the other, no matter what; but then some other town, some other house, some house elsewhere, some new house in Wyoming; and Evelyn there—Evelyn with her in the new house, after all; and Toby; little Toby stacking his towers; Toby again, but older now, his hair grown back and brown, not blond as she had expected; brown-haired Toby reading a book; Toby, brown-haired and leaving that other house, leaving Nora and Evelyn for Denver; and Desma swinging an ax; Desma swinging from a tree, or in a porch swing; and Rob swinging, swinging around to look at her from among the goblins; swinging through the Sanchez ranch gate in his Sunday suit, swinging the shotgun into his hands; swinging Josie around the hardwood; and Josie; Josie walking crook-footed, crook-footed forever; Josie forced to wear a brace, forced to wear glasses, always-dizzy Josie; always-dizzy but alive, run-over by a camel and lived to tell it Josie; Josie and Rob in some distant town, in some unfamiliar church; a shower of rice and a small child; no—two children; a house somewhere in the blue north; tarot cards on a felt tabletop and graying Rob in overalls and some strange contraption in his driveway; and Dolan; little Dolan resting his chin on folded hands, watching the silk of the sieving line darken; Dolan, by firelight, stitching up his brother’s arm with bandaged hands; and now walking arm-in-arm with a dark-haired woman through a city that must be San Francisco; and Nora, taking the train; taking the train past singing waters, taking the train to rock with her bare foot the cradle of a solemn little girl-child; Dolan and girl-child in a green park; no—churchyard; child laying flowers down, child waving to Dolan from the schoolhouse steps; Dolan’s scarred knuckles braiding all that schoolgirl hair; and Nora in some new house, alone; or in some new house with Emmett—and Emmett gray, Emmett old, Emmett aging alongside her, as Evelyn had; Emmett from room to room in his slippers; Emmett holding her hand in sleep; his sleep and hers; and Evelyn; Evelyn in the new house at twenty; Evelyn at thirty; Evelyn on the Denver train; Evelyn in the theater seat beside her, holding back tears for Toby, brown-haired Toby taking his bows onstage; taking his time at the lectern, taking a turn through the lamplit neighborhood with a tall young man; and Evelyn’s hand in her own in the kitchen; and Emmett laughing with Evelyn on the porch; on their porch; on the porch of some new house, theirs but not this, not this one at all; not this sundrowned farm with its camel and rider sleeping side by side together beneath the roasted earth; not this house, with its puncheon log where the words were written, where they had lived once, and yes, been happy—she saw everything, she saw it all.