Beyond the Horizon (10 page)

‘Gee-ah,' the man managed to say into the mule's ear. He slapped the beast's shoulder and they sauntered forward. Waves of heat rising off the ground distorted the distant visions of this place. At moments it looked as if nothing was there, but then the place would reappear with more detail than before. They passed the threshold of illusion and the man could see this was a civilized place indeed. A band of men trolled through the grasses a quarter mile out from the settlement. As the man passed by them, he asked what this place was called.

Most of them ignored his query. One looked up; he had eyes of solid white and seemed to look directly at the man. ‘Wie heisst dieser
Ort?'

‘This place,' the man said. ‘Tell me this is Fort James.'

‘Ja,' the blind man said. ‘Das ist Fort James.'

Making bricks was new to the stranger. He had participated in many things in his time, but brickmaking was not one of them. After stating that he had work to do, the stranger set out in search of anything that might be used as a tool—a length of metal, a board of hardwood, a flat-sided stone. Some miles from the Indian village he happened across a broke-down crate. He dusted the powdered earth off the wood. The sun and aridity of this place nearly petrified the wood. He brought it back to the Indian village.

By fixing the pieces together with some cord and bracing it with rock, the stranger formed a rectangular mold. He knelt by one of the walls of the fallen tower, which had buckled under its own weight. At its base some of the Indian bricks still fitted together, giving shape to what was once a sturdy structure. The stranger scraped his index finger between two of the bricks, pulling out mulled bits of mortar. He tasted it. Each one of these bricks was formed from a mold and left to bake. This place was like a kiln. All that lived in this place was formed from dirt. From the beginning, there was nothing else other than rock and dirt. But then some men, if they were even that, came along and spat in the dirt and made mud. They wiped it on their foreheads and found it to be a way to keep the mosquitoes away. It cooled their blisters.

Within a thousand years these cavemen, while wallowing in their own filth, would come to plop gobs of mud one on top of the other. They formed rudimentary walls. Then slept in shallow pits, huddled next to whatever mate theyd found. Give these men another thousand years and they achieved what the stranger had already made—a brick
mold.

He sat cross-legged, looking at his invention—the empty wooden box. In here he would shape not just the future of this place, he would recreate a past that never
was.

The boy and his father were shown to the town's boarding house. They were given a room on the second floor. The woman who took them there did not speak to them; she simply unlocked the door and ushered them inside. Clothes lay on the bed—some for the boy, some for his father. At the far end of the room there was a door that led out onto a balcony. The window by the bed provided the same view. The walls were washed grey, the plaster chipping away from the
lath.

The boy took a step toward the bed, toward the door and window. The floorboards creaked. Outside, the vista opened up across the ocean. Any lands beyond here were non-existent, swallowed in the tides.

‘This gonna be our home?' the boy asked.

His father walked past him and sat down on the bed, pulled off his boots. The rank odor of sweat and mildew soured the air. ‘Reckon it's as good a place as any,' he
said.

Reaching his destination gave the man extra strength. He entered the town proper under his own power. When he dismounted the mule, he led it by the bridle. Short flattened structures made of adobe bricks, walls buttressed with scraps of driftwood, lined the long barren patches of soil demarcating the streets. A shack made of tin metal wafted flames inside, a wiry man swinging a mallet against a giant metal slab. His foot pumped a bellows and the inside of the shop glowed like the annals of our molten world before it cooled into
rock.

‘¡Tenemos bolsas de comida!' a woman with a dead eye called out. ‘Usted está cansado. Coma. ¡Coma!'

Street urchins called out from under their blanket awnings. ‘Puedo decirle su fortuna,' one called out. The man shook his
head.

A plank wood building with an oil sheet over the window holes appeared to be the most established place. The man set his course for
it.

‘You there,' a man called from atop one of the buildings. He stood a full body height above the man. ‘You sellin that mule?'

The man shook his
head.

‘I thinks you
are.'

‘I caint,' the man said weakly.

Some dark-skinned boys ran through the streets between the clusters of vendors and mendicants, the urchins and vagabonds. One stopped and stroked the mule's
mane.

‘Give you ten pounds coffee, five pounds lard for that mule,' the roofman said. He put his hands on his
hips.

Again the man said he couldnt sell the animal. He began to explain how he needed the mule, how he would only be here for a day or two, but he was interrupted by the boy cursing. ‘¡Su caballo sucio mordió la mano!' The boy doubled over, holding his hand to the core of his body. A cloaked woman ran to the boy. He cursed again.

‘He nip ya?' the man asked.

Some of the boy's friends, in noticing their playmate's absence, circled back around to the scene. The woman swaddled the boy in her cloak, whispered to
him.

‘If you dont trade me that donkey,' the roofman said. The man turned his back on the roofman, but the roofman kept talking. ‘If you dont want to deal, I can foller you to wherever youre asleepin and I'll steal im from
ya.'

Before the man could turn around to respond, the old woman shoved him. The roofman laughed.

‘Cortaré el pene si mi hijo se muere de la septicemia,' she
said.

‘Su hijo es una molestia en nuestro pueblo fascinante bruja vieja,' the roofman called to the woman.

The woman's eyes sharpened. ‘Y usted no nos sirve para nada. Háganos un favor y deje que este señor se le mate,' she hissed. Then she spat on the ground and pointed up at the man. Without another word, she whisked the boy
away.

The roofman turned his attention back to the man. ‘I'll kill you
too.'

The man blinked. ‘You'll kill
me?'

‘Cut your throat open.'

The man stood long in the bustle of the road, smoke and children swarming around him. He collected his thoughts. Somewhere farther on, people were singing. He tried to locate the source of the noise.

‘Need my mule,' he finally said. He looked up to where the roofman had been standing. Now he was
gone.

He waited a moment for the man to resurface. From across the street, the old woman and the boy with the bitten hand glared at him. He tugged at the mule's bridle and they continued gravitating to the slatwood building.

‘Hey-a mister,' a woman with olive skin and pocked cheeks called from a doorway. She pulled at the crotch of her dress. ‘Queira ter um fogo entre as suas pernas?' She licked her lips and pulled an armstrap of her dress down to expose her breast. ‘Faça-o muito. Faça-o vir duas vezes.'

The man looked away, to the other side of the street. The woman called at him again, but her words were lost in the din of the street. A man with little hair on his face and a flattened top hat stood on a wooden block. He had a black boy on the block with him. ‘Miracles and wonders!' he called. The man stopped to see whom the auctioneer addressed. But the streets kept moving, no one paying him any mind. ‘This boy, blind from birth, will see today.' He leaned forward, the boy motionless at his side. ‘How, you ask? My secret formula—the base a mud dredged from the Rio Mancos and the ancient healing ways of the wild Indian, strong enough to sap a snakebite, potent enough to scar over a bullet wound. Now people always ask me the same thing: does it work? And the answer is yes; it most definitely
does.

‘Yes, friends, I have done my time in the cavalry, been to old Mexico, shot a few Indians and cured a few men. In fact this medicine recipe was given to me by an Indian shaman on his deathbed…'

The man pressed on, uncertain where he could stop for respite, where he might be safe. The slatwood building seemed less promising the closer the man came to it. A gap between two buildings provided a dark alleyway and passage to a quieter section of town, a part obscured by these structures. Halfway through the slotted path the man noticed a Mexican slumped against the wall, apparently asleep. He nudged the Mexican with his boot. He did not stir. The man knelt down and shook the Mexican by the shoulder. Only then did the man notice the stab wounds in the Mexican's torso.

‘You,' a voice called down. The man craned his head straight back, mouth a-yawp, to look directly above him. He recognized the voice instantly. It was the roofman.

‘You kill that dirty sumbitch?'

‘No,' the man said. ‘I jus found
him.'

‘Like hell,' the roofman called down. ‘You probably got his blood all over ya. I could call for the law and theyd flog ya right to death tomorra morn. They'll do that if you cut the heart out of a
man.'

The man looked at the Mexican's body, realizing for the first time just how concave the chest cavity appeared. Blood, still warm, continued to soak through the garments.

‘You do this?' the man asked.

The roofman laughed. ‘What—How'd I do that? I'm up here. One of youse down there did that. Probably some other Mexicano hiding just down the alleyway a piece. Waitin to gut you, dry your guts out and sell em to an injun.'

The man looked down the alleyway. Pockets of darkness shrouded either side. Only a dusky haze marked where it opened up on the other
side.

‘Leave the mule,' the roofman said. ‘Leave him and I wont call out for the law. Just go back out the way you come in. I'll see to it that you dont get cut
up.'

The man continued staring off into the shadows. He looked back in the direction whence he came. It was also blinding, but in a different way. He could hear the mishmash of voices. He let the mule's reins fall from his hand and he crawled on all fours under the animal. As he stood to run he could hear the roofman's laughter echoing through the channel behind
him.

Simple deduction led the stranger to the well. If a civilization had been in this place before, then there was surely a source of water. He closed his eyes and smelled the air. In his mind, he thought of another time, when he decided to kill the buzzard and dive down into the rubble of the tower. There had been water in there, near the bottom. How the Indians of ancient times came to know there was an aquifer here was beyond him. He drank deeply from the waters. Then he stripped off his clothes and bathed. This far down and sheltered as he was, there was little light. This place was cold and he shivered. He dunked his clothes, wrung them out, then waterlogged them again.

He slogged his sopping clothes back to the surface. First he rolled in the dust, letting the dirt stick to his wet skin. He appeared as another color. Then he took his clothes and wrung them out into the soil. He squatted so the tip of his penis grazed the ground. He used a stick to mix the water and dirt together and slopped the concoction into the wooden
box.

The sun beat down on the hot flat pan of the rubbled village. The mud on the stranger's skin dried and cracked, peeled up. Meanwhile the brick also baked. But unlike the stranger's flesh, which boiled and blistered, softening with sweat, the mud hardened.

At dusk, when the sun was finished with this place, the stranger used the mixing stick to pull the rectangle of mud from the wooden case. He held it up for inspection. In the evening sun, the whitened block of mud glowed red, like this brick was pulled from the forges of an infernal world.

In time he had piles of bricks. He wandered the horizons to the north and south, to the east and inevitably to the west. There he gathered more boards, some lengths of burlap, a handful of metal rivets. He found the bones of a dead steer, picked clean by vultures, bleached by the sun. He took only the cow skull, figuring the brain cavity to be a good mortar, the horns a possible
tool.

From his findings the stranger was able to make another set of casks to dry bricks. Now he could set six bricks at a time. On hotter days he could fire two sets of bricks in a day. While the mud dried he took the horns and scraped down the old Indian adobe bricks and fashioned them into more rectangular objects. The stranger trapped mice and snakes, buzzards, and cooked them in the sun alongside the bricks. He ate them and tossed their bones and innards into the well. Still he drank those same waters.

The quieter side of town was no less rambunctious than the market side of town. Several wagons lined the street. A large brickwalled structure with a wooden gate appeared to be the hub of activity. The gate opened and closed often, men in uniforms carrying out pallets of dry goods, crates with different color dots of paint on
them.

‘You there,' a soldier called. He pointed at the man. ‘Give us a hand.'

The man did as he was told and grabbed the edge of the pallet they were hoisting up onto the back of a wagon.

‘Man just stole my mule,' he
said.

‘Lift on three,' the soldier
said.

He counted out loud and they hefted the pallet up the rest of the way and onto the wagon. ‘Get it outta here,' the soldier called to the wagon driver. ‘Commandante says he wants it there in three days' time. Best not to disappoint
him.'

‘Think the fella that stole my mule also killed a
man.'

‘A soldier?'

‘A Mexican.'

The soldier shrugged and turned back to the outgoing cargo.

‘Need my mule to get back to my wife.'

This gave the soldier pause. ‘Get back?'

‘I'm just here to register my family for the century.'

‘You dont got a
job?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You dont work here, work in Fort James?'

‘Caint say I do. I'm just here to register my family.'

The soldier laughed. ‘Ever mans got a job, got something he does.'

‘I do,' the man insisted. ‘I'm here to register my family.'

‘Need a job, friend. Commandante will see to that.' He pointed over the man's shoulder. ‘That your mule?'