Beyond the Horizon (6 page)

What possessed the man to keep on traveling as he did baffled the stranger. Rarely did the man pause for sleep. He rode on through both day and night, stopping only when the mule tired. Traces of the man became more scant. The stranger picked up his pace until he came to nearly a trot. He seemed to be racing against the day, trying to duck under the sun as it collided with the horizon. If the man slept any length of time, the stranger figured it must be in the saddle. Nightmares woke the man often. And of all nightmares—those realities born from our wakeful lives and perpetuated in our minds—the man thought of his rescue from the
ship.

At first both he and his father took it for a hallucination. Dusk and the hours following it on the deck of the ship proved good for this. Every couple nights another man committed suicide because of these visions. Some men murdered men because they were told to do so by long-since-eaten crew members.

‘Do you see it?' his father asked.

The boy nodded meekly, too afraid to say anything, afraid the other crew might hear, afraid the vision would dissipate. Around them the crew slumbered away, snoring. In the captain's quarters, the first mate was having his way with a younger deck hand. For the last five nights he came for the boy afterward. Twice his father successfully defended him. Three times now his father had to watch.

The canoe glided stealthily through the water, two shadowed figures inside dipped their paddles and stroked in unison. Behind them, equally as clandestine, came a fleet of canoes. What moonlight there was cast the mystery men's shadows long into the placid waters.

The father instructed his son to follow him. They clambered down below deck and into their quarters. Above them they could hear the rhythmic thrusting of the first mate sodomizing another boy. Hearing this gave the father pause and he looked at his son. Then he took a kerosene lantern—the only lantern whose fuel hadnt been imbibed. He lit it, held it in one
hand.

‘Take the other end of the footlocker,' he said. The boy did as he was told. ‘If these visitors is what I think they is, tonight ends
it.'

The man had not slept for two days. He rode the mule until it staggered off the trail and cantered in a circle in the brush. The man shushed the mule, dismounted and rubbed its muzzle.

‘Been ridin you too hard,' he said. ‘Suppose we oughta set up here for a day, maybe
two.'

Even as he spoke he glanced around, looked down the path, up at the slopes on either side. Alone as he ever was, he knew there were eyes upon him, though he could not see them. As he set up camp, he kept the shiv in hand. Darkness came on quickly here in the depths of the valleys. Soon the black behemoth mountains hulked darker than the sky, which unfurled like singed parchment, blotched indigo and purple, stippled with stars.

He sat upright against a lean tree listening for the sounds of visitors. He squinted into the blackest of the shadows to adjust his vision to the night. Then he shielded his eyes from the glow of the sky and scanned the passage he'd taken between the mountains. It could have very well been a trick of the mind, but the man saw something dart from one shadowed space into another. He clutched the shiv in his hand and squatted by the tree. He stopped breathing and listened. But again there was nothing. The mule snuffled, and in his mind the man cursed the beast for being so noisy. Then, very distinctly, a twig snapped.

Without much further thought the man looked to the mountain. He knew it to be bouldered and littered with scrag. He ran to the incline and grappled at whatever he could. He came to a perch—a flat rock jutting from the slope. He climbed atop the stone table and lay flat on his stomach to peer over the edge. Below, his mule brayed lowly. He watched for some time, squinting against the night, trying to see who prowled about his camp. Eventually he relaxed and rolled onto his back. He would sleep here tonight.

When the boy and his father came back up to the deck with the footlocker, the planked wood beneath their feet ran with blood. The natives from the canoes stood silently over the dismembered bodies of the crew. A hand cut longways—just the ring finger and little finger, most of the wrist—clung to a railing, tendons hanging loose at the end. The Portuguese man hanged from the rigging, his entrails dangling, his feet amputated. The boy stayed close to his father.

‘Got a footlocker a supplies,' his father said. The natives circled them. Their blades—a scythe, a saber and a sickle—gleamed in the moonlight. ‘My boy and me, we havent eaten nobody, havent killed no
one.'

He held the lantern up to illuminate the faces of the natives. They had no eyebrows. Beneath the smears of blood they were tattooed, their nostrils stippled with studs, intricate scarring adorned their foreheads and chests. They were naked.

From the captain's quarters another native appeared. He ducked as he came through the threshold. Where his nipples should have been, two swathes of scar tissue shined in the lantern light. In his hands he held the head of the first mate. It may have been a thing of fiction in the boy's recount of the incident, but he believed the first mate's mouth still moved, his eyes fixated on the last surviving members of the crew. When the native turned his head to speak to his men the boy noticed his ears were cropped flat across the top. He exchanged a few short syllables with the men and they went below
deck.

He looked back at the father and son, grunted and squatted. He held the first mate's head by the scalp in one hand and used a dirk in his free hand to stab out the eyes. When he was finished he set the head on the deck and rested his elbows on his knees.

‘Heard a story once,' the father said. ‘Heard some fellas bought an island big as a country from some injuns for some stain glass and beads.'

The native stared at them blankly. The boy imagined the natives who disappeared into the shadows just moments ago would spring forth any moment and kill them just as they had everyone else. Still his father spoke. ‘We're just askin for you to not kill us. I got stuff to trade.'

He motioned to the footlocker and the native nodded. His father unlatched each side and flapped open the top. The natives stepped over the head and inspected the contents of the footlocker. A bird of bright feather flew from the night and perched atop the opened lid. He cooed and the boy and his father exchanged looks. A bird meant the promise of land. First the native shuffled through the miscellany of items, then he tried a few out: holding the telescope up to his eye, examining the maps, unfolding and refolding the jackknife. He did not touch the clothes folded in the bottom of the
box.

It satisfied the natives well enough. The native stood and whooped, his jaw moving in unnatural form, his tattooed tongue coming to rest between his teeth. From the shadows the rest of the native men appeared, weapons in hand. The native spoke in whoops and yips, his eyes alighting and his tongue flapping like a rabid animal. The father put his arm around the
boy.

They each felt a hand on their backs and they walked to the edge of the deck where the canoes were moored beneath.

The stranger lost the trail of the man. He had not anticipated a pace so vigorous or a man so scant in his markings. For many stretches the stranger ran. He ran through the flats where someday farms with circular fields dictated by irrigation systems would dot the landscape, etching rows of corn that would make them look like LP records to the crop duster pilots. He ran in paths where power lines would one day swoop and dip from one skeletal structure to the next and eventually come to a relay station that rose like the frame of a great cathedral, buzzing with the electricity of a ghost choir.

He cut through a housing plat where balloon construction homes would crop up overnight and dice up the land with sidewalks, fences and driveways. He followed in the track of a coast-to-coast rail line with oil tankers toting one behind the other like a caravan of fallen silos, boxcars and freighters chugging by like assembly line coffins. He felt the energy of this world pulsate in him; radiation and microwaves, cellular phone signals and fallout—bits of data and memory floated about him as if they had become part of space. And the stranger knew, in the deepest wells of his mind, these broadcasts only appeared to fade or become lost to time. If he could chase a radio transmission far enough—out into the outermost reaches of our solar system, the galaxy and greater universe even—the voices would be just as they were, young as the day the signal was born, old as the day it turned to static on a transistor radio.

And there would be highways with overpasses, roundabouts and single blinking yellow lights, roads lined with streaks of brine and salted for the winter truckers and nine-to-fivers. Routes would be augured through the crests of mountains—thousands of years' worth of mud and sediments compacting and metamorphing—scooped out by steam-powered crawlers with teethed shovels. The things that thwarted Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea meant nothing to the future. The borders of civilization were leveled by the telegraph wire, plowed under by fiber optic networks, and forgotten by the satellites that glided silently above the earth at ten thousand miles per hour. Rivers and oceans—the Sargasso Sea—became cemeteries for foolish men whose vision of the future extended no farther than the water's
edge.

‘No comprende ingles,' the Mexicano said. He looked up at the out-of-breath stranger, sag eyed and sweaty.

The stranger smiled wide and goofy, plopped himself on the ground. It was a nice enough spot for rest. They both looked at the sun; it seared high in the sky and seemed to quiver there, unmoving.

‘¿Alimento?' The stranger's pronunciation was off, a little
weak.

The Mexicano looked at him sideways—an incredulous squint.
‘Sí.'

He moved his serape to the side and pulled out a canvas bag. He took out two strips of jerky and gave one to the stranger. The stranger bit his and chewed. The Mexicano did likewise.

‘Buena vista,' the stranger
said.

Again the Mexicano nodded, said,
‘Sí.'

The stranger looked over his shoulder at the deadened tree, the bald spot on the hillside. The limbs of the tree spread out against the sky like fractures caused from thunder blasts.

‘Este lugar tiene la enfermedad del muerte,' the stranger
said.

The Mexicano looked mildly surprised at the stranger's sudden facility with language.

‘¿Por qué diría usted eso?' he asked. He took a pouch of tobacco from his boot and some rolling paper from his pocket. ‘¿Cigar?'

The stranger smiled and declined the cigar. He pointed to the tree, to the patch of soil beneath it where the dirt was fresh packed and a few round stones lined the grave.

‘¿Un amigo suyo?'

The Mexicano placed the tobacco in the paper and licked the edge. He rolled it and held it between his lips. After he lit the cigar and puffed on it a few times, he asked how long the stranger had been following
him.

This made the stranger laugh. ‘Desde el principio de tiempo,' he
said.

The Mexicano replaced the tobacco pouch into his boot. ‘Tengo el dinero,' he said. He knew the offer was in
vain.

The stranger stood and dusted off the seat of his pants. ‘Pase. Camine conmigo.'

The Mexicano did as he was told and followed the stranger over to the fresh grave under the tree. A shovel crafted from a tin can lay beside the tree. Using the toe of his boot, the stranger burrowed a hole in the dirt. ‘Usted pulla.'

It took less than a half hour for the Mexicano to excavate the grave. The sun still suspended over the site, baking everything beneath it into wrought forms. The coffin was a pine wood box buried less than a foot beneath the
soil.

‘Ábralo,' the stranger
said.

There was a moment of hesitation before the Mexicano complied and used his hands to claw at the slat board cover. The nails popped from the wood and the lid came loose. Inside the corpse lay face up, the skin gnarly and the clothes ragged. The body had wintered somewhere, been dead a season or
two.

‘Sáquelo,' the stranger said. The Mexicano protested in hurried pleadings and the stranger let him talk. Soon the Mexicano exhausted all pleadings. He stood and straddled the grave, grabbed the corpse by the shirt and hefted him up in one motion. He staggered, holding his breath until he set the corpse on the ground. For a moment, maybe more, the stranger and the Mexicano stood over the body, examining it like it might spring back to life. The Mexicano mumbled to himself and his eyes glistened with either sweat or tears or
both.

‘¿Por qué estás haciendo esto?' he asked.

The stranger studied the Mexicano, his rakish serape and burlap trousers. He thought for a moment to respond, then thought better of it. He seized the Mexicano as the corpse had been handled. They fell to the ground. The Mexicano cried out and the stranger hugged his body close. Together they rolled across the ground until they fell into the empty coffin. The lid fell shut. There was a moment of darkness and the men cuddled. The stranger positioned one hand under the Mexicano's chin. ‘¡Dios mío!' he called. Then the stranger snapped his
neck.

The man woke with the sun baking the flat rock on the side of the mountain. Whatever mystics the night had cast on his mind were clarified now in the daylight. He looked down the slope at his mule and few supplies. All remained untouched.

He tottered down the mountainside and packed the satchel for the mule. He went to untie the hitch that bound his animal to a tree and saw a figure out of the corner of his eye. Slowly he turned to face the man. And the man did not try to hide. Most of his head was shaved, his chest and face painted. He wore a necklace of teeth.