Beyond the Horizon (11 page)

The beast wandered in the street and the man ran to it, looking at the rooftops around
him.

Not long after the boy and his father settled into their quarters, there was a knock at the door. The innkeeper and his father talked in a low tone and the conversation ended with the innkeeper giving his father a pair of metal hooks with wooden handles. His father tossed the hooks on the bed, walked to the opposite door and out onto the balcony. The boy followed him. For a while they just stood, looking out over the rolling waters, watching the fishing boats bob up and down, the ships farther out seemingly sitting still.

Finally his father spoke. ‘Been able to navigate the open ocean, one side of the world to the other and these town dwellers wont let me on a boat. Say I gotta work on the docks.'

‘There aint another thing you can do instead?' the boy asked.

‘Damn it, I jus said I got to work on the docks. It's the deal of that doctor man, that witch doctor.'

‘He get us the room and clothes
too?'

His father didnt answer; he just spat over the railing and wiped his lips on his sleeve. ‘They say ships dont need a man like me. Say they got maps instead. Only thing I'm good for is hauling cargo like I'm some type of damn mule.'

Down on the pier a longshoreman rang a bell and the other dock workers came running. A ship was coming in. The men shoved at one another, trying to get to the end of the
dock.

‘Look at em,' his father said. ‘Get paid per piece of cargo they carry. Fight like dogs to work.' He shook his head. ‘Told me start tomorrow.'

The bell rang early, before either the boy or his father was awake. On the third clang, the boy roused his father.

‘Bells ringin,' he
said.

‘Goddamn it,' his father said and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He pulled on his boots, pair of second-handers that came with his clothes.

In the early morning, without the sun risen, it was difficult to navigate the streets. Everything led to the docks though and as other longshoremen ran past him, the father picked up his pace. By the time he reached the dock, a dozen men were already there, one of them reeled the boat in and moored it to a piling.

‘Got a fair amount a fish,' one of the men on the boat called.

The bell on the dock clanged again.

The father stepped forward, ready to take a piece of cargo, whatever form it might be
in.

‘You there, new hands,' a man said. He seized the father by the wrist. ‘Wheres your hooks?'

‘My what?'

‘The hooks you was given. Dont act like you didnt know you was supposed to have the hooks.'

‘I forgot em, I guess.'

Other men shuffled past the father and grabbed their sacks of cargo, piercing the burlap sacks with their hooks and toting them off the dock. A man on a wooden box at the end of the dock shouted and pointed frantically, directing the longshoremen where to carry their goods.

‘Here,' the boss said. He handed the father a set of hooks with yellow handles. ‘Take this off your pay. If you dont give em back to me when youre done, it'll cost you a week's wages.'

For a moment the father stood dumbly, the tools in his
hand.

‘Go,' the boss shouted.

The father turned around and stooped to grab a bag as he'd seen the other men do, but another longshoreman snagged the sack out from under him. He elbowed yet another man and sank his hook into the bag. He pulled and the sack came apart at the
seam.

‘Damn greenhorn,' a man on the boat said. ‘Gotta loop the hook through on either side of the sack, keeps the bag from tearin.'

The father rehooked the sack and slung it up onto his shoulder.

‘Salthouse!' the man on the block shouted. He pointed to the right. The father did as he was told and trod over to a grey stone building with a steep roof. A man stood outside, directing the organization of the sacks.

‘You salthouse?' he asked.

‘Yup.'

‘Sacks torn.'

‘Put my hook in wrong.'

The salthouse man shrugged. ‘Might be, but I gotta charge
ya.'

The father must have started at the statement because the salthouse man immediately gave his justification. ‘When a sacks torn open, I dont know whether I got all my fish. You coulda stole one and hid it somewhere. Or you might have just made a mistake. But that mistake could mean you dropped some fish somewhere along the way. The dock manager'll take care of
it.'

The father wanted to argue, but the other longshoremen were already dropping their second loads and running back to the
dock.

By the time the father ran back to the dock, the first boat was gone and another was tethered to the other side of the dock. The cargo on this ship was larger and required two men to lift the sacks together.

‘Still usin my hooks for this load?' the dock manager
said.

‘I guess I was planning on it,' the father
said.

‘Took so long getting back here, I thought maybe you'd run back to that inn the doctor put you in and got your own hooks.'

‘Got held up at the salthouse because my bag was teared.'

The dock manager smirked and took out a notepad, made a mark on it. ‘Gonna have to charge you for the hooks a second time.'

‘Whys that?'

‘Two boats, two jobs, two times you forgot your tools.'

‘Grab this here end,' a longshoreman said. He pointed at the father. He did as he was told and the men lifted the sack. ‘You go backward,' the old longshoreman said. ‘Got bad knees.'

Walking backward with the cargo was cumbersome, forcing the father to waddle.

‘Gonna have to pick up the pace there,' the old longshoreman said. ‘Wont make enough money by dawdling along.'

‘Smokehouse!' the director yelled.

The old longshoreman cursed under his breath, then looked at the father. ‘That whore's sons gonna make us traipse all across the town to the smokery.' Despite having bad knees, the old man doubled their speed, nearly knocking the father down. ‘Need another load after this and I'm a-set.'

‘Set for what?' the father asked. He only responded with a question to get the old man talking in an effort to slow him
down.

‘Youre livin at the inn, aint
ya?'

The father nodded.

‘You mean you aint gotten in that pussy up there?'

‘Didnt know there was
any.'

The old man licked his chops. ‘Whole lot of pussy there at night, ever woman in this village done a bit of whorin. Best way to make money aside from fishin.'

‘That
so.'

‘Best to get em in the morning though, when theyre still fresh. By evenin it'll feel like youre stickin yer peter in a jar of jelly.'

The old man used his chin to point to the smokehouse. A man with an apron stood out front. ‘Right here,' he said and they set down the
sack.

‘Come on,' the old man said and together they ran back to the docks. The sun was just breaking over the ocean and another ship laden with cargo was coming
in.

The stranger lined the bricks along the ground, making outlines of the structures he hoped to build. The weather had begun to turn cold and he wanted shelter. While some of the bricks—the ones with crisp edges and evenly baked—could be stacked tightly, most still required some type of mortar.

The stranger dug an oblong hole, not unlike a grave. First he cut the hard-packed ground with the cow horn, then he used a plank of wood to move the loosened clumps of soil aside. The ground was solid enough that it would hold water should he be able to fill the hole. Rains were scant and short. He opted to waterlog his clothes and wring them into the hole. After his tenth trip, he recognized the effort to be futile. He formulated a new plan and drank more than his fill from the well. He did not work; he simply waited. Then he relieved himself in the hole. He made a few more trips to the well and soaked and wrung his clothes. Finally there was enough liquid to make a paste.

He focused his efforts on constructing a short, three-foot-high wall as long as he was tall. If he could make a wall this big, then he could build fires to cook by in the evenings. Once the fire burned down to coals he could kick the warm ashes into the soil and have a bed to protect him from the cold. Should the weather become colder, as it most definitely would, he could stretch some burlap over some sticks and trap some heat as he slept.

Such were his days, making bricks and mortar, then in the evening, trapping the varmints of this place, sometimes baiting one with the other. Sometimes he cooked them, sometimes he ate them raw. He threw the entrails either into the well or the mortar pit. When the weather turned brutal, the protection of the wall and the warmth of the fire were no match against the plateau winds, so he took shelter in the pit leading down into the well. Down deep enough, the temperature stayed above freezing.

Just as he himself migrated, other creatures began moving, making themselves apparent for the first time. The stranger found a coyote, not much bigger than a loaf of bread, sniffing at the ashes of the fire. Because he was feral himself, the stranger was able to sneak up on the animal without being smelt. With a single jab he pierced through the wild dog's backbone with the cow horn. It let out a single yelp, squirmed for a moment, but the stranger held fast to the horn and the coyote stopped moving. He picked up the pup, stroked where the fur was still dry. Then he heard a growl. A she-coyote with her mane bristling lunged forward.

The stranger received the attack with open arms. They rolled across the ground. The jowls of the dog clamped on the meat of the stranger's upper arm. With his free hand he took the coyote by the scruff and pulled her off his arm. A chunk of flesh pulled from his bicep and he began to bleed instantly. The coyote's snout waved back and forth, a flash of fangs and saliva. Her rear leg kicked, the nails scratching deep into the stranger's thigh. He let go of the scruff and grabbed the leg, gave it a quick jerk and it broke. The coyote let out a high-pitched whimper, gave another attempt at a bite, then began to scamper away, dragging the now clubbed paw behind
her.

The stranger got to his feet. He was smeared in the grease of his own blood. Stumbling toward the wounded creature, he stooped to pick up a brick. The coyote, tongue hanging from one side of her mouth, tried to trot along faster. She whined as she limped along. The stranger caught up to the dog and brought the hardened clay block down on the animal's skull. A few other coyotes padded by, looking on at the wounded stranger and their dead kin without sorrow.

When the vultures came, the stranger flung stones and killed two of them. He drained the blood from his kills into the well, threw the feathers and brains into the mortar pit. From the coyote's pelt, he fashioned a loincloth. He used the much smaller pelt from the pup as a head covering, a tendon for a chinstrap. When the snow fell, he scooped it up in his arms and threw it into the well, knowing it would eventually
melt.

Years passed this way: with the stranger killing his way through the winter months and in the summer producing hundreds—maybe even thousands—of bricks. By his tenth year of making bricks, the stranger constructed a shanty, a place for him to stay during the winter. The well, now a noxious place festering with flies and forever tainted with rot, provided most of the mortar. As the water level in the well fell, it left mud rings scummed on the walls, making for the best paste. Meanwhile the liquid itself could still be used to make the base for the bricks.

And the bricks themselves had improved integrity in recent years. More often the liquid contained a fair amount of hair and bone and other unidentifiable fibrous materials. Just as the ancient Egyptians used straw to add cohesion to their bricks, the stranger used whatever he could scavenge.

When the first Indians came along, they were puzzled, studying the stranger's claim. They wandered around his shanty. One picked up the cow skull. Another crouched over a dried splatter of blood, now turned brown. The stranger himself came crawling up from the well, hauling a sack of sludge. The Indians stopped their respective activities and looked at the creature before
them.

The stranger set the sack down and stood up straight. He looked from one Indian to the next, each one individually. There must have been a dozen of
them.

‘Amigos,' he said. ‘You should see the place I'm creating.' The Indians' brows became collectively screwed at this foreign tongue. The stranger smiled and invited them into his shanty.

At dusk the man came to the slatwood building. The soldier in his limited counseling had told the man that people generally went there when they came into Fort James; he didnt understand why the man went down the side alleyway. Inside the structure whoops of laughter resounded. Men argued. Women laughed and made animalistic noises. The place smelled of smoke and urine.

The man walked around the room once, circling a long wood table.

‘Got a new fish,' a youngin said. He might have been a couple years junior to the man, but gave the impression that he'd lived a hard life so far and the end was in sight. The man nodded his head to acknowledge the other men there.

The whore he'd seen earlier stood up from a table. She swayed as she spoke. ‘Finalmente venha procura uma mulher?'

Some of the men laughed, but a drunk Mexican sitting next to her reached up her skirt. She let out a yelp, eliciting laughter from all in the building. She leaned over the table with her eyes closed, the skirt now halfway up her back. The drunkard pulled his pants down and mounted the woman from behind. Another wave of laughter and whoops rang
out.

‘Acted too late,' an old timer
said.