by Leif Enger
“Yes, the boy’s cartridges. The ones he fired at you.”
“No, I don’t. Of course not.”
“You unloaded his weapon, as I recall.”
Siringo said, “Yes, there were a number of people about. I thought it wise to unload, in case there were live rounds in the chamber.”
“But you didn’t keep them?”
“I put them in my pocket. My clothes, however, were burnt with powder,” Siringo replied. “Mr. Hansen downtown provided me with two new shirts, also these nice trousers. I threw the old ones away—the cartridges must’ve gone with them.”
The lieutenant said, “Mr. Siringo, the Roberts boy fired four times. I looked everywhere for evidence of bullet strikes. A gouge in the street, chipped siding on nearby structures. I couldn’t find a thing.”
“Tough to find bullet marks on a dirt road, sir.”
“There’s only one sign he shot at all—the powder burns on your clothing. You would agree that suggests an accurate aim.”
A conductor stepped out on the platform and nodded to Siringo.
The lieutenant said quietly, “Mr. Siringo, I believe Roberts was firing blank loads.”
“Blanks!” I exclaimed.
“A charge of gunpowder but no projectile,” the lieutenant said, adding, “Your bravery’s remarkable by all accounts, but four shots at eight feet—I am trying to see how you lived.”
Siringo studied the young man. “Perhaps I am immortal.”
“With respect, Mr. Siringo: no.”
“Did Roberts have any other bullets on his person?”
“One full box of forty-four-caliber rounds,” said the officer. “He’d just bought them from Art Ravel, apparently.”
“And were they compromised?”
“No. Regular cartridges, nothing suspect.”
Siringo gazed almost fondly at the farm-boy lieutenant. “So this blank-loads business is conjectural. It’s imaginary.”
The young man didn’t answer. The train chuffed inching forward; laughing now, Siringo pushed me aboard and climbed up after.
17
Whatever had struck him funny didn’t last long—when we pulled out of Columbus, things were already going south for Charles Siringo. He’d acquired Hood but the price was high. I am no medical man but have wondered whether the nearness of those four gunshots set off some realignments in his body and brain. Is that possible? For the pigment on his hands and face began from that day to separate into brown and tan. He acquired the look of weakening preservation. His cough, already frightful, became worse; he might now spend thirty minutes hawking up a tadpole. Most unlike himself, he withdrew into silence. It was disturbing after so long in his voluble company. At first I mistook this for a mere meditative state of mind, even a sign of conscience. But when the conductor came through to collect our tickets Siringo looked at him in simian fashion, then went slowly through every pocket in his jacket and trousers before discovering the tickets in his right-hand pocket where he had placed them five minutes earlier. I found myself wondering whether the sheer proximity of that barrage—his jacket caught fire!—had begun to dismantle him somehow.
Or perhaps it was only that men must fall apart at last.
“You think I am depraved, but I’m not,” he said finally, over strong coffee in the dining car. “Art Ravel is depraved.”
It took me a moment to see what he meant. “The lieutenant is right, then. They were blank loads.”
“I was looking down the barrel. Anything but blanks and he’d have shot me through the eyeball.” Siringo pulled a spent cartridge from his pocket. “Don’t give me that accusing look. Observe this shell. Strange, isn’t it? See the tip? It’s crimped, not smooth.”
I looked it over. I wouldn’t have known it from any other cartridge—a bullet was a bullet, I always supposed.
Siringo said, “I had a drink with Art. We came to terms.”
“What terms?”
“Listen, Becket. He used to have a sideline selling blanks to film companies. You know how much shooting goes on in pictures. But business dropped off. There sat Art with a roomful of blanks.” Siringo leaned across the table. “He’s been selling them to the ignorant to make back his losses. Prospectors, amateur militias. Mexicans. He buried five thousand rounds in a shipment across the border.”
“But that’s monstrous!”
“Most people have never seen a blank load. They’re like you—they aren’t conversant with ammo.”
I said, “So Hood had no chance.”
“None.”
I was unable to speak for a minute. Finally I said, “Did you know? Did you know somehow?”
“I suspected that would matter to you. No, I did not.”
“But the bullets in his sack,” I remembered. “They were real bullets. The lieutenant examined them.”
“Of course they were real. Art was on hand, you’ll recall, after the shooting,” Siringo replied. “It’s trouble for him if the blanks are discovered. He made a simple exchange.” Looking wearily at me he added, “Depraved, as I said. Though I’m grateful to him—if not for Mr. Ravel I guess you’d be annoying Hood Roberts right now, instead of me.”
“Why tell me this?”
“Because who would believe you?” He fell quiet again and turned away. “And because you liked the boy.”
18
Sometime in the night the train slowed and jerked me forward; I woke with a flinch. Siringo, however, stayed sleeping even when the train lurched to a halt. People rose wondering from their seats, and still he did not wake. Finally a conductor did come through, swinging his lantern, to explain that the locomotive had stopped for reasons unknown and that two railroad mechanics were on the job at this moment. I looked down at Siringo, who slept on. He looked shrunken and his teeth gummy. I said, “Charlie. Charlie,” and for long moments it seemed he might not wake. The conductor held his lantern close and said, “What about your pard here? Is he all right?”
I didn’t know. I put my ear to his mouth and couldn’t hear him breathing. But when I pulled away his eyes were open and he said, “Why are we stopped?”
“The engine broke.”
We waited. In half an hour a stalled train smells like cattle. People were up and restless, not angry but wishing for food or some way to pass the time. A boy went up and down the cars offering limes and other citrus. I remembered Glendon, who had done this as a boy. I said, “Let’s have a lime.”
Siringo nodded but didn’t speak.
It was at this time I felt freedom coming toward me like clear weather.
I took the lime and cut it in two with a paring knife loaned me by the citrus boy and sucked at my half while Siringo turned his inside out and ripped the flesh with his teeth. He sucked it down thirstily then began to cough. He coughed a long while, occasionally spitting into the empty lime skin. Soon the conductor came round again, saying the engine could not be repaired that night. The town of Aztec was ten miles to the west along the tracks. Those willing to walk could be there in three hours. The rest of us must wait until another locomotive was sent to pull us in, which would be sometime the next day.
“Let’s go,” said Siringo.
“You aren’t ready for it.”
He stood there weaving.
“For goodness’ sake, Siringo, my collarbone is broken.”
But he would have none of my refusal. Energized by crisis, he said, “Get our bags.”
The night was cool and dewy. I placed my bag over my good shoulder, Siringo took a grip in each hand and we set off west along the tracks with perhaps sixty fellow travelers tripping and laughing and a few singing as we went. Once again Siringo surprised me with his strength—every time he seemed at the end of his vitality, some kernel of anger or inquiry took hold and brought him back.
“I don’t know what happened to the girl,” he told me, as we walked.
“Alazon?”
It’s true we hadn’t seen her. She had not been in the arms shop with Hood. It n
agged at Siringo that she was unaccounted for.
I said, “I am sorry for Alazon. She was in love with him.”
“Manure,” he cheerfully replied. “The older I get, the more I doubt that whole business is anything but manure.”
“She sacrificed everything to go with him. Her family. Her prospects—she had hopes of acting, you know. Wouldn’t you call that love?”
“Nope. No, sir. I’ve known eight or ten girls in my life who’d of sacrificed their baby brothers to be with me, they were that devoted.” Siringo set his grips down and stretched his arms and lifted them again. “Of course when it come down to it they wouldn’t do what I said. They hadn’t any obedience in them but wanted this or that according to their wills.”
“So love is defined by unquestioning obedience to you, no matter the circumstance.”
He thought about it. “Yes, that states it nicely.”
“Your version of love is a rare strain.”
“Mock if you like, I had it once. My little Darlys loved me like that, before Glen Dobie sent her away.”
“Darlys DeFoe?”
We walked on for a minute. I know—the merciful thing would’ve been to let the conversation die, but you will understand I felt little mercy for Siringo just then.
I said, “She is the person who shot you, you know.”
“No, sir.”
“Yes, it’s a certainty. She tried to talk to you and you rebuffed her. I saw it.”
“I was shot down by the handsome boy outlaw Hood Roberts,” Siringo said, so whimsically I had a glimpse of him writing it this way in another memoir.
“You know the truth,” I said.
“Can you prove me wrong then?” In the chill starlight he turned his eyes to me; they looked near laughter.
I said, “It doesn’t matter what you say, you and I will always know.”
We hiked along the rails. Between Siringo’s infirmity and my own, we were well to the rear of our fellow passengers. Someone in the forefront had begun leading rounds of choruses which kept breaking up in laughter, then beginning again.
He said, “I will outlast you, Becket.”
19
We reached Aztec shortly after sunup. It was cool and blue as a morning painted on canvas, and though my shoulder and feet ached it was clear I felt better than Siringo did. He’d said nothing for the last hour but seemed to wither into himself until he roused somewhat as we walked into the village. Pointing at the mountains beyond he said, “From that peak you would see Arizona.”
“Do you want breakfast?”
“I want a room. I want to close my eyes.”
The hotel was full of what the desk clerk called “distressed travelers,” but we found rooms above a stark café. Straight to bed I went, drifting wretchedly through a long nap. Siringo was across the hall and his torrid coughing was present at the edges like a curtain blowing into my sleep. Sometime later I rose and went to his door.
“Charlie?”
Receiving no answer I went down to the café and ordered eggs and ham. It was the best meal I’d had since leaving the Hundred and One, yet Siringo and his bitter cough stayed on my mind. He still didn’t answer after breakfast, so I went to the proprietor. When I suggested one of his boarders might be ill he looked at me as though I were bringing this news to spite him—sulkily he handed me a key.
Siringo was alive. He was propped in his bed at a perilous tilt. He said, as he had in Columbus, “Is my face all right?”
“No, Charlie,” I replied, since it wasn’t. The left half of his face was wayward or fallen. It had drifted out of communication. I want to say his left half had died. The eyelid had failed him and stuck midway. I remember the chalky glaze behind it.
He said, again, “Is my fay zaw rye?”
Endings are rarely what we wish. Hood Roberts, for example: He hadn’t any brave last words. I doubt he had time to think of any—if so, he was beyond using them by the time I knelt at his side. When writing of Hood to Susannah I had to stop from time to time and collect myself, for an old lyric kept returning to me—that verse about the young cowboy wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay. When Redstart was a certain age he would refuse to go to sleep until Susannah stood in his doorway and sang him that song.
Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,
Six pretty maidens to sing me a song;
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,
Roses to deaden the sods as they fall.
Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it’s getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.
Now I sat by Siringo watching his ending come into his face. The resentful proprietor fetched a doctor, a bald big-headed Scot in his sixties, late of army service. Peering in Siringo’s eyes he diagnosed a stroke of paralysis. Siringo’s mind was in disarray and his body wouldn’t listen to orders.
“What’s to be done?” I asked, in the hall.
“Rest,” said the doctor.
“Here?”
“I would not move him now. Let this be his hospital.” The old Scot rubbed his large hands and said, “He was famous once, that old rooster.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Charlie Siringo. I read one of his books on a train. Long ago, but I have a great memory!” The doctor had a generous smile. “I think he told more lies than Jacob, son of Isaac. It was a good book though.”
The doctor stayed a long time, talkative and wholly unruffled by his patient’s condition. He was newly retired. He’d been stationed at Camp Furlong and spoke of it wistfully—he still looked strong enough to whip any number of sergeants so I imagine he was happy, some months later, to be summoned back into service for what was termed a punitive expedition in Mexico.
“Well, this has been something,” he said finally, heaving lightly to his feet like a colt. “Charlie Siringo! Man knows not his time.”
“When will you come back?”
The doctor allowed he had a granddaughter being christened and would be away several days. He watched my eyes and asked was anyone willing to stay and nurse the old man until his return, and I said I would.
“Are you his relative then?”
“No. I am his captive.”
The doctor smiled. He did not ask for clarification. He said, “Well. Get ready to be set free.”
20
Siringo ate because he had to. I fed him tiny meals ground up with the head of a mallet: shredded beef, corn, black beans. He was determined to live despite his dead half, despite the slackness creeping across his face. He had lost the ability to pronounce words but would write legible notes, balancing his right hand on a tablet in his lap. There was a small steadfast Calcuttan man who came and took care of Siringo’s private tasks and this Siringo would not mention. The notes were of necessity short which only magnified their snappish character.
Dr. is a blind—, he wrote. More sauce on the meat.
Meantime he thinned. If he had been a strap of leather before, he was now an attenuated membrane near ripping. Once I went in and his face was wet. I asked if he was frightened, at which rage entered his good right eye and he wrote on the tablet, You weak—Becket. I think he believed his anger would blockade death. Even so, he was like a boat that sinks at its mooring and all you can see is the mast.
When a week had passed and there was no change, only further thinning, I went to bed and had myself a dream. It was hard as life. I was on the bank beside moving water, and a woman rode along the opposite shore. Downstream she cantered, away from me, a scabbarded rifle across her back. She sat the horse impeccably and watching her I thought she might be Susannah until she cantered back upriver searching a place to ford. She was a fierce and beautiful Mexican woman. She never saw me. I woke feeling I had stumbled into another man’s mind.
In the morning I spoke with the bald doctor, then went to see Siringo and give him his tepid breakfast.
“I am leaving today,�
� I told him, when he had managed a few bites.
He would not reply but put his right eye upon me. Certainly there was some pepper in there but he would not pick up the pencil and write.
“I am leaving you in the care of Dr. Slane,” I said.
His gaze slid off me toward the wall. For no good reason I felt like a betrayer but bucked up and said, “I see you are worse this morning, I am sorry about that. I doubt we will see one another again. Goodbye.”
Only then did he lurch and get hold of the pencil. I will outlast is what he wrote.
I left him that way and picked up my bag and went down to the train station. The man behind the window said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“East or west?” said he.
The Rarotongans
1
A group of young women was also heading for California. Zealous botanists, they left the train at every stop to hunt local wildflowers, which they suspended in bunches from the coach ceiling. The drying blossoms swayed overhead, purple asters, orange skyrockets, white blooms plain as your chin but with the stunning name of heliotropes; most dangled low enough so passengers had to dodge them to walk, but it was also true we had the best-smelling coach on the train and no one minded except a soft banker in a homburg who sneezed hard under the waving flora.
Straightaway I got out pen and blotter, meaning to write Susannah an explanation—to describe why I was continuing west, though I had already been away longer than my intended six weeks. Certainly my reasons were passable. They had to do with allegiance, with my implicit promise to Glendon to help him “see this through.”
Indeed my travels—willing and forced—had already carried me too near completion to turn back now. Yet once again I found the letter quite impossible to write. As New Mexico rumbled past, then blanched Arizona, I searched through the cars until I found a conductor familiar with the Rienda Valley. He didn’t know Blue or the name Soto but knew the river itself because he had fished it once for three weeks with his father and uncles.