Beyond the Horizon (4 page)

‘Lieve
God.'

The stranger clucked his tongue, kicked the man in the arm. A scream rang out. ‘Waar is
hij?'

‘U zult mij doden?'

The stranger smiled. How quickly men wanted opposite things. One moment it's life, the next theyre hoping for death. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘How far out was he—how many days?'

‘Drie.'

The stranger nodded, saying he had one more task. He scooped the man up like he might a babe and carried him across the plains. ‘You cant die just yet,' he cooed. ‘We've got to find a decent resting place first.'

In his arms the fur trapper sobbed.

In the evening hours, after the blue of the sky succumbed and bled into the redder hues of the passing of the day, the stranger and his bounty came to a low-built sodhouse. The plankwood door creaked back and forth in the breeze. Neither lantern light nor smoke from the tin pipe chimney gave indication to life inside. The stranger smelled the air, noted a rankness he associated with rotting meat. Then he spied the dismembered corpse of a woman. The Apache had been here. He must be close on their heels.

‘Slecht land,' the fur trapper murmured, dizzy with delirium from losing too much blood.

The stranger shushed his captive and heaved the man to the ground. He scanned the land about him. He shut his eyes and smelled the decay of the place full in his nostrils. He sauntered away from the crumpled form of the fur trapper toward the homestead. He creaked open the
door.

‘Dia duit.'

All inside—the father and two sons—lay dead. The stranger allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He picked up a biscuit from the supper table, still set. It tasted fresh enough. He swiped his finger through the blood on the stovetop. It hardly smudged and had a tack to
it.

A clay pitcher sat on a stool by a bed. The stranger picked up the pitcher and smelled the water. He closed his eyes and inhaled again. He poured the water from the pitcher, the stream splashing off the table and trickling across the dirt floor to the doorway. Once the pitcher drained completely, he untied the uniform from around his waist and crammed it into the stoneware vessel. He walked back outside. The fur trapper still lay where he had been left. The stranger turned his attention to the pitcher. He knelt, putting his hand to the ground like an Indian scout might. Then he nodded and used his bare hands to scoop out a hole in the earth.

Once the pitcher lay buried, he hefted the fur trapper back onto his shoulders. The man stank of feces, of blood and sweat. Still he breathed, a shaky inhalation and a wheezing exhalation. Pause. Then another rattling.

‘Last thing most men do on this planet is shit themselves,' the stranger said. ‘Natural thing—the bowels open up, shit just rolls
out.'

He walked a hundred paces and looked at the Y-shaped post hanging crooked over the well, a rope looped in the elbow. ‘It's because we run out of energy, cant keep it tight,' the stranger laughed. The fur trapper, in his delusional state, chuckled. ‘Killed a baby a piece ago,' the stranger said. ‘Most babies are born right into shit with the mother pushing so hard. It is as if I summed up all of life by pre-empting
it.'

The stranger looped the rope from the well around the both of them, binding the trapper's arm and legs to his torso in a clove hitch. Then he jumped into the well, waiting for the rope to pull tight.

Mountains loomed closer with each passing hour. Yet they stood as artificial things, jags of glass set out on the horizon only to tease the man. He consulted his maps. If the cartographer who drew this scape years ago were not a liar, then Fort James lay on the other side of the mountains. A thin dotted line noted where one might pass without much weather, without too much struggle.

When the mountains came closer still and took on dimension, the man stopped to study them. He had traveled through most of the day again. He had forsaken his appetite, his desire to slumber. But he knew here in the evening hours, with shadows masking entire slopes of the mountains, the tips of white shimmering like capstones of an ancient Aztec temple, he knew it to be wise only to travel into the folds of the mountains in the daylight. A rounded rock could turn his mule's hoof. An elevated trail might take an unexpected turn. He'd heard stories. Stories told by lantern light from the mouths of sailor men. He was young then and his mind made the tales bigger, he
knew.

The mast rigger told the other men how he learned his trade in a jungle land. Said he swung from vines and shimmied up trees to escape from the injuns there. ‘Weird ones they was,' he said. ‘Twigs in their faces, tattoos all o'er their bodies. All of em skinny though. Probably from all the runnin.'

The boy's father, a navigator and quartermaster on the schooner, said the mast rigger was lucky, theyd be fatter if theyd caught him. Everyone laughed, even the Portuguese deckhand.

But the Norseman had the best stories. He told of his days in the mountains of his country—only there the mountains were called
alps.

‘No travel in the night,' he said, his accent only growing thicker with imbibing grog. ‘Men like beasts eat night travelers. Best to make fire.'

The other sailors laughed loudly at the anecdote. But the boy remained captivated. The biggest threat in every story involved being eaten. ‘You were a mountain man?' he asked.

The Norseman agreed with a sailor's
aye.

‘How'd you end up on a boat?'

‘It what Norsemen do,' he said. He quaffed back the last of his grog and swayed with the lilt of the ship. ‘There none mountains i oceanen.'

Later, the boy's father said it wasnt true, what the men in the galley had mentioned. ‘They were drunk,' he said. ‘They invent stories to out-talk each other. Dont want you gettin the wrong ideas bout the world.'

The boy asked if he would ever see the mountains. For as far back as he could remember he had lived on a boat, enlisted with his father as a deckhand. On his eighth birthday he learned to keep the galley, how to trap and kill rats. Once he could brave the open deck he swabbed and fetched and rigged.

‘Not if I can help it,' his father said. ‘Aint nothin inland that you need to see. Bunch of nonsense there.'

The mountains were grander in scale than he originally supposed. It took him another day to reach the foothills and he camped where the land began a steep grade into a canyon. He mixed the last of his chaff meal with water and swished it about his mouth. If he was lucky, pieces of the meal would stick in his teeth and in the morning he could suck them out for sustenance. He tethered his mule to the tree and looked up at the thick band of stars sprawled out, composing the Milky Way. Deep in the southern sky Corvus and Centarus danced together.

It had been this way on the ship. Some nights his father seemed a softer man. He stood at the bow rail, pointing out the constellations to the boy, telling him how to chart a course by following the stars. ‘Had a Spaniard teach me bout the stars while back,' he said. ‘Before you came along.' The boy ignored the sudden angst that embittered his father's speech. In a moment's time, he continued talking. ‘Spaniard said the stars are like million suns throughout the galaxy—whatever that is. I think it's the same as heaven. He tried to tell me what we see in the sky is a history of what happened. Said it was like getting a letter: we can read what happened and what we're readin seems like it's happenin now.' He shook his head as if he'd lost his way in talking. ‘But it already happened, we just see the past for a moment.'

The boy said he didnt understand.

His father chose his words cautiously. ‘This man—the Spaniard—tells me we could very well be lookin at some stars that already done burned themselves out. He told me, sober as a mission priest, the stars with their energy, can navigate the distances between places. But they can also guide us through time.' He chuckled. ‘This is why I dont want you to take what these men say as bein true.'

‘You dont believe him?' the boy asked.

Again, the man considered his answer before replying. ‘Aint that you cant trust em. It aint that. But these stories they tell, theyre like a half truth—partly something they made up. Hell, they might even believe it any more. Spoke it right into life.'

The boy nodded. He smelled the air, looked at the stars. Other men could have the world, he'd take the sea for himself.

When he woke, he scarcely recognized his surroundings. Light bathed the slope and there was no escaping it. He sat up, put his hand to his gut. He had terrible hunger pain. He sucked the meal from his teeth, but that did little to assuage his appetite. He picked the crust from the corners of his eyes and ate of it too. Leaving his mule hitched to a patch of scrub, he wandered the hillside, flipping rocks over in search of insects, looking for a place where ground varmint might store their winter food. He came to a flat spot on the hill—bald, the dirt bleached white by the sun. An odd place, the man figured, with no hope of food. Yet the strangeness drew him
in.

Atop the slope there a scrag tree stood, branches sprawled out in petrified order. Wood scorched down to grey, looked to be blistered by lightning. A vulture perched on the topmost limb. A flitting shadow caught the man's attention and he looked to the sky. Above him a half dozen more buzzards circled in slow
arcs.

Beneath the tree an oblong hole gaped, a few round stones scattered about it. The man slowed his gait and studied the scene. Only his mule hitched a quarter mile yonder moved. The buzzards too. A corpse lay next to the open grave. It was a man's body nearly decayed beyond recognition. Rags of clothes—a pair of trousers and a flimsy shirt—covered the rough-hewn leather of his skin. He lay face down and for that the man was grateful. First thing the vultures take is the
eyes.

He came close enough to peer into the grave. And what he saw there began to puzzle him. He crouched down by the body and scanned his surroundings in all directions. No human as far as he could see was afoot. He looked back into the grave, into the pinewood box. All seemed reasonable: the grave was shallow certainly; but the ground was hard. There was a coffin and that too seemed reasonable given the vista. At one point in time maybe the scrag had bloomed with flowers. It would be a pleasant place to rest for an eternity. Even the displaced corpse could be a product of coyotes or scavengers, graverobbers. Men did do such things. He'd heard stories.

The second body, the one in the coffin, bothered him. His skin stretched tight, still intact; he looked to be asleep, though judging by the angle of his neck, he was not. Even so, the man said sir a couple times before inching forward. His death must have been recent—he still had his eyes in his
head.

The man tried to concoct a plot wherein this man could have been robbing this shallow grave and fallen in, breaking his neck. He shook his head. Then he searched the fresher corpse's body for valuables. The corpse wore a serape and the man had to unfasten it to search through the dead man's pockets. But there was nothing, save a canvas bag of jerky. The man immediately ate a strip of the meat, swallowing it with barely a chew. Bigger pieces meant the meat would stay in his gut longer.

The corpse still had boots on his feet. The man wadded a long, translucent strip of jerky into his cheek. Squelching the juice from the meat through his teeth, the man thought of the abnormality of such a crime. He looked around again, this time taking longer and more squinted glances into each horizon. Nothing moved. Now even his mule stood stock still in the
sun.

‘It aint graverobbin,' he said out loud. His voice carried harder in the wide open than he thought it would. It startled him. Even the mule, a quarter mile away, redirected his gaze at the man. He justified the action in his mind as he tugged a boot of rich red leather with stamped designs in the upper off a stiffened foot. Fine things like these left to dry rot, left to feed some roving band of coyotes. As the second boot slid off the corpse's foot, a couple dollars held together with a silver clip and a pouch of tobacco fell out. The pouch was made from the scrotum of a quarter horse, a tendon woven around the opening as a drawstring.

Without another hesitation he pulled on the boots, stuffing the money into the upper, the tobacco into his pocket. He walked briskly back to the mule and rode into the mountains.

Deep in the mountains proved a strange place. Trees with no business being alive still thrived, rooted in rock and sheltered on each side of the box canyons. Contrasted against the evergreen cover, the soil red and raw and rocked appeared as an open wound, a scab on the earth. Ancients had lived here, people who ground their sown oats into meal, who drank from clay pots like urns. Anasazi people would build their shelters in cliff overhangs and cubbies, who constructed labyrinths of apartments in the sides of mountains. Petroglyphs—their rudimentary form of snaked and swirled written language—adorned the walls in chalked white paint. Whether the original inhabitants had anything worth saying, the stranger knew
not.

He wandered through the stooped doorframes of the structures these people made. Crumbling bricks composed of nothing more than straw and mud had weathered a thousand years. The stranger ran his fingers over them. He closed his eyes and his mind went into a dark place. Someday other people would find these ruins—first some stray cowhands, then locals rife with curiosity. Not long after the locals discovered this place, then the rest of the world would come to know of it. Flocking here in droves, on paved roadways, bringing their families with them and no intent to settle, they would trod trails, led by an hourly paid outdoorsman in a wide-brimmed hat and pristine uniform. A ranger—root word range. Little placards would describe what they saw, telling them what men who spent more time in school than the rest of the world gave as truth.