Beyond the Horizon (12 page)

‘Pardon?'

‘Wanted you,' the old timer elaborated. ‘Got the Mexicano's prick instead. Wont even get paid.' The old timer gave the man a once over and added, ‘Not that you coulda paid her anyway.'

The man took advantage of the impromptu conversation. ‘Soldier from the fort sent me here. Said this is where all the people come.'

‘Sure the soldier didnt say she was where all the people come?' the youngin said. He pointed at the whore now passed out across the table. Another youngin was pulling her leg straight back. A few whoops of approval went up, but not with the same exuberance as before.

The old timer laughed at the youngin's joke. ‘Kids alright,' he said. He refocused his attention on the man. ‘People used to come here. Aint much a reason to any more.'

‘Why
not?'

The old timer looked peeved at the further questioning. ‘There just aint nothing to come here
for.'

It didnt take long for the boy's father to become adept at longshoreman work. Within a couple weeks he adjusted so he knew when certain ships would come in. Often times the boy's father waited up, sitting on the edge of the bed, the metal hooks at ready in his fists. The bell sounded and he walked from the room as if called forth by a voice from the clouds.

Sometimes the boy watched from the balcony as his father worked, hauling sacks of fish, feed, tea and spices. There were odd times, when the boy—he'd adapted too—knew there were no regular ships, yet his father rose from the bed, grabbed the hooks and started for the door. Within a minute's time, the bell would ring. In the hours following the shifts, his father did not come back to the room. The boy took to looking through the footlocker, what few relics they had from before their time in the Sargasso. His father had long told him never to leave the room without him. Said that if he left the room by himself, he better not come
back.

The boy could lay on the floor and press his ear to the boards and hear the muted voices of the people below in the common room. During the day it was mostly longshoremen talking, lying, making up stories, swapping tales about places not-here.

The Indians were hard workers. Together the number of bricks produced grew twentyfold, then doubled and doubled again. The stranger became the de facto leader of the cohort. Because the tribe was larger, it was harder to sustain. Some of the men formed hunting parties. They went out for several days at a time and when they returned they brought wild game, already skinned and smoked. They tossed the entrails into the well as the stranger instructed.

The well remained the central dumping site for the tribe. All excrement and waste went into the well. If women cut their hair, the hair was thrown in. Rendered fat from killings, if it was not burned, would also be tossed into the hole. A woman miscarried and the tiny stillborn with the umbilical cord was laid to rest in the pit. In the summer, the stink became unbearable and the women stretched some hides over a frame and covered the
well.

The mixing holes were equally disgusting. Shallow things, like graves, the holes were filled with the muck from the well and the dirt was sifted in. Initially the Indians, eager to do their part in the construction process, danced in the pits, slogged the mud into the molds. But their enthusiasm faded and now the pits were a place where men went to be punished. The stranger or some elder might sentence a man who did not catch anything on the hunt to march in place in the confines of the pits. At first time frames were given—a man might have to walk in place in the pit for two days. Then the restrictions were forgotten altogether—the men having to do their time in the pits until another's indiscretion set him
free.

Within a matter of a couple decades, the village was established, small crowded buildings hugging one another, a system of cisterns collected rainwater and stored it in troughs. Children were born and raised knowing nothing but this place. All traces of the fallen tower, the rambling rounded bricks of the ancient Indian settlement, were
gone.

That night the man slept in a stable at the edge of town. He tied his mule to a post at the gate's edge. He crawled under a fence and lay down in a heap of dried grass. As he lay his head in the pillow of feed, he smelled manure. A goat bayed once. A chicken or two flapped their wings. Otherwise things stayed quiet.

He tried to study the sky, but the haze from the fires in the town drowned out the otherworldly lights, and only the brightest of stars could be seen. Soon his eyes grew weary of searching for things not visible.

He dreamt of his time in Port of Tobacco. He relived when he found his father's stash of bills wedged into a crack in the plastered walls. Without another thought the boy replaced the money and looked about the room. He was old enough to work, though he did not ask why his father wouldnt let him. Most nights his father came in late and did not want to talk. Some nights he brought one of the whores—the innkeeper's wife or a woman from the pub. No matter, it was always the same. He would make the boy watch while he had his way with the woman.

‘This is how men do it, boy,' he'd say between thrusts.

Sometimes the woman would acknowledge the boy's presence; other times the boy just sat as a silent third party in the bed, trying to refocus his gaze out the window. Birds flocked about the harbor, screaming unto the grey skies.

When his father climaxed, he would stand up rigid, then slouch forward, loathe to take his member out. Depending on the woman, they might exchange some utterances. But the innkeeper's wife would look at the boy. Her brow wrinkled. She shook her head. His father strode across the room and pulled a pair of longjohns from the hook on the back of the
door.

‘Father told me bout the Sargasso,' she whispered. She stretched out one hand and stroked the boy's face. She was still naked, her pubis still wetted down, teeth marks still rankled around her nipples.

The boy didnt respond.

‘He just tryin to show you how a man does.'

His father, appearing now as no more than a specter in the evening light, turned around. ‘Whad you just
say?'

The woman sat up and her breasts rolled forward. ‘Tellin him how you was just tryin to be a good
man.'

‘You say something bout the Sargasso?' He grabbed a hook off the wall and walked across the room, toward
her.

She put one hand out to deflect the oncoming blow. Her other hand held up the bedsheet. The hook gigged through the bones of her hand and split down between the index and middle finger webbing. She screamed. Blood trickled down off her elbow and stained the sheets.

‘Get out,' his father said quietly. ‘Youre just a common whore. Bitch with crotch rot, just like his
ma.'

He pointed the hook at the boy, who cowered by the woman in the corner.

The innkeeper's wife pulled the sheet from the bed, wrapped herself in it and made haste from the room. Droplets of blood marked her path. She looked over her shoulder and cursed both the father and son, said theres no place in the world for either of
them.

‘You, boy,' a boot swatted the man across the posterior. He started awake and scrambled to his feet. It was morning now, though just barely. He turned to face his assailant. ‘This aint no inn.' The stablehand was a darkman, skin like night.

‘Needed a place to rest,' the man
said.

‘Places for asses, chickens—not people.'

The man nodded. ‘Caint give you pay if thats what youre askin
for.'

The darkman huffed. ‘Dont make no difference to me. This place aint mine. I's here to keep up the place, git rid a the trouble.'

‘Well, I'll get outta your way then,' the man sidestepped the stablehand. The hitching post stood solo. ‘Wheres my mule?'

The darkman was already using a pitchfork to scoop up piles of straw and dung. He didnt give the man a glance when he said there wasnt no mule here when he arrived; it mustve been stolen while he was sleeping. ‘Lucky the thief didnt cut your throat open
too.'

‘Who do I tell about my mule bein stolen?'

The stablehand's shoulders seemed to shake with suppressed laughter. ‘Guess you could tell the old commandante,' he said. ‘But it sounds like he might have his hands full with those injuns they spotted this morn.'

The Indians' efforts were impressive. Dozens of squared buildings were erected in a matter of years. The bricks, given their potpourri composition, held together rather well. In this place the sun could transform anything. A thicker wall of stones was erected. The stranger ordered it to enclose an entire section of the village. It needed to be twenty feet tall. The wall itself was actually constructed by building two parallel walls. The walls were braced with wooden beams, then filled with dirt and rock. If anyone were ever to attempt to blast through the wall, the insides would spill out on them, crushing them and burying them, leaving their bodies for speculative statements by archeologists.

The wooden beams were farmed from the banks of a river five miles south. Indian men whose arms rippled with muscles carried the trees in their entirety back to the village. From there, other Indians with tools hewed the trees into beams and supports. The wood shavings were either burned into ash or collected; either way they were deposited into the
well.

The hunting parties were mostly younger men, still agile, but without the stout body muscle needed for hauling bricks and lumber. They stayed out for weeks at a time, whole packs of them. When they returned, the entire village feasted. They ate bison, bird and deer. The stranger kept an inventory of the kills and who did the killing. By his accounts, the stranger determined one boy did more killing than any of the others.

When the stranger asked the boy's hunting party how he learned to kill so efficiently, the other boys said he had no rules. The boy killed with whatever means he had. He preyed on weak animals, injured animals, bear cubs and sickly deer. He beat their skulls in with rocks, impaled them with spears, broke their necks with his hands. If he were to ask the Indian boy the same question, the boy wouldve simply responded that he had better rules for hunting. Nothing is sacred in this world. The taste of flesh and the feeling of a full belly is enough to blind any man to the horrors we create. Time, it is known, can heal all things, the layers of dirt and lies building up one on top of another like scar tissue.

It was in this revelation that the stranger knew when the time came for the slaughter of his village, he would have to wait for the Indian boy and his hunting party to be gone—the Indian boy was too much like him to be handled like a common
man.

When the time came, his father rose from the bed, dressed, took the hooks from the wall and went to the docks. The bell clanged. The boy knew that since his father cut the innkeeper's wife's hand, things would be different. It was one thing for the innkeeper to whore out his own wife; it was another to injure
her.

A boat, as it sidled up to dock, blotted out the rising sun, making the immediate events clearer to the boy. The gangplank set down on the dock and the captain of the vessel met with the dock manager. Meanwhile the longshoremen huddled in groups. The boy watched as his father went from one group to the next, shut out of each. He went up close to the gangplank to claim the first spot in line. The manager and the father exchanged a few short words. Then, in going their own directions, the manager nodded to the old longshoreman.

Still, now with years passed and the images amplified in his mind, the man does not know why he did not call out. Yes, the sound of his voice may not have carried over the rooftops and over the din of the bustling dock workers, but at least he would have done more than witness his father's murder. The old longshoreman stood by a feedsack from the boat, awaiting someone to help heft the other end. His father, being without company, came over to the old
man.

The old man made a gesture to suggest switching places. He pointed at his lower back. The father shrugged and walked to the opposite side of the bag. He stooped to lace his hook into the burlap. In one sharp motion, the old longshoreman threaded the hook into the nape of the father's neck. The boy saw the head spasm and fall limp when, with a final tug, the top of the backbone was ripped from the base of the skull. Another dock worker came over to the corpse and helped throw him into the water.

The boy backed off the balcony and into the room. The sounds from outside seemed to filter in more loudly than usual. In haste, the boy took the money from the crack in the wall and threw the bills into the footlocker.

The man went to the gate at the fort. He waited for a soldier to open the great wooden door, but none came. Peddlers roamed the streets, selling whistles carved from sticks. Across the way, a man called out, ‘Miracles and wonders, friends!' The man recognized him as the medicine salesman from the day before. ‘Got one cure for everything. If you got a malady of the body, mind or soul, this here concoction is all you need…'

The man turned to the door of the fort again and pounded his fist against
it.

‘Niemand dort für Sie,' a beggar slouched by the door
said.

The man only glanced at the beggar and pounded on the door again.

Then the man heard a bleating, a screech above the sounds of the village. He turned and saw the roofman riding on his mule. He pulled hard on the animal's reins, coercing another shriek from the beast. He circled around the medicine salesman. The man turned around and pounded on the door again.

A slot opened up and a man's face appeared in the framed opening. ‘Whaddya knockin on this door
for?'

‘Want to talk with the commandante,' the man
said.