Effigy (16 page)

Death by shattered knee is cruel. The pain is blinding—the Tracker witnessed this, watched Younger Brother’s eyes veil over and cease to see. The blood persisted against all pressure. The sun tracked steadily overhead. Death came on the heels of darkness, the chill of mountain nightfall stopping Younger Brother’s heart.

As dawn broke over the second day, his body lay covered in rocks not far from where the Tracker crouched. Near enough for his spirit to whisper and be heard.

My wife, Brother. My wife
.

The shame the Tracker knew then surpassed all vengeful blood lust, all grief. He knows it now, remembering—a keen, sick-making pressure at the backs of his lowered eyes.

Younger Brother was barely cold under his weight of stone and already the Tracker was warming himself with the idea of her. Younger Brother’s woman. Younger Brother’s widow now.

There would be no driving that warmth away. The best he could do was to feed it, stoke it to roaring, turn it loose on the valley below. Over the next three days many would leave with their dead and their wounded, but the Tracker would stay on till the bitter end. Somewhere inside the Mericat camp lay the hand that had shot Younger Brother’s leg out from under him. The eye that had guided the ball.

The Tracker touches a hand to the page before him, willing himself into the present day. There is no gazing upon the picture without being there. Not where he was—crouched among boulders, nursing his rage—but
there
, inside those circled wagons. Inside the thirsting girl.

He closes the book. Feeds another black, twisted stick to the fire. The flames rise up in thanks, dulling for the moment the sense of his own dimming. His is no ordinary sickness. He has appetite enough. His limbs serve their purpose. His heart thuds on. Still, whenever he turns his gaze inward, he meets this gradual darkening down.

The fire spits, sending up a cinder that lifts the Tracker’s eyes. They meet their match in the firelight cooled and returned, the steady yellow-green of a lupine gaze. The rush in the Tracker’s rib cage is not fear. Nothing like. The wolf is well known to him—thick silver mane, black markings about the eyes. Once a pack leader, half of a breeding pair, he is now a solitary beast. The Tracker reaches out without thinking, turning the Father in his tracks. Night swallows his tail tip. The Tracker’s hand gropes and falls.

EIGHT MONTHS
after Bill Drown and his trembling boy passed through the fabled Golden Gate, San Francisco had mushroomed to the point where it could no longer be called a town. Fall rains had melted the streets. Crouched toadlike in the dark, John James closed his hands around two cold fistfuls of mud. He was five years old, wedged beneath the solid fact of a boardwalk, out front of the third gambling house Bill Drown had graced with his presence that night. Through the boom and press of boots, the flexion of planks, he kept alert for his father’s stride—at once hastier and more burdened than that of other men.

Not three days after they’d traded the shifting deck of the
California
for dry land, Bill Drown had lit out for the goldfields. John James had stayed behind in the rooming house they now called home, left to the dubious care of its owner, a one-time mountain man who saw only the ghosts of things through the pearly skins of his eyes.

Bunks were at a premium, so John James bedded down in the potato cupboard, his nights passed among sacks that breathed a dirt sweetness even as they threatened to rub him raw. Those same potatoes kept him barely fed, served floating in broth that
stunk of fish or mutton or both. The mountain man doled out supper at sundown, cornmeal porridge at dawn. Shallow wooden bowls, slick with grease. No seconds—he stood guard over the stove with his starch-stained knife.

Milk-eyes or no, he could make out movement well enough. John James learned the hard way when, after a week of near starvation, he scuttled close and swiped his bowl into the bubbling kettle. The mountain man’s blade came down flat and nasty across his knuckles. He let out a yelp that met with laughter all down the table’s length.

Only the mountain man kept a straight face. “Next time you’ll catch ’er edge on.”

John James nodded, coddling his fist.

On the odd night when there was a bed going spare, John James still chose to climb into his cupboard and draw shut the door.

“Men’ll do things to a boy when he’s sleeping,” Bill Drown had warned him the morning he left. He spoke it darkly, bent over his packing while John James hopped and fretted behind. “Be sure and bed down with your back to the wall.”

John James could summon only the vaguest of pictures—a bearded, eyeless creature sneaking up on him from behind. He could cry out, but the most that would do would be to turn the miners in their bunks, so many grey-blanketed waves. The mountain man wouldn’t come—the mountain man might well be the transgressor. Whoever he was, his arms would be too thick to reach way back into the cupboard. Back to where, pale fleshed and dirty as a potato himself, John James curled.

In the weeks that followed, he learned to look further afield. Hunger transformed him, twisting a tentative child into a skittering, thieving thing. It turned out a boom town had its blessings:
those who struck it rich quick could be relied on to be foolish with their goods. More than once he came upon a provision-stocked mule tethered out front of a saloon, its owner drinking hard inside in an effort to dull his delight.

Bill Drown’s first strike was minor, but it was enough to bring him in from the fields. He staggered into the rooming house long after the lamps had been snuffed. After convincing the mountain man to lay down his gun, he dug his drowsy son out of the cupboard and carried him to a corner bunk. Keeping his back to the rows of snoring miners, he lit his camp lantern, nudging the wick down low. He draped his arm over John James’s shoulder and drew the boy close. “See here now.” He reached inside his stained waistcoat and produced a balled-up rag, tied so it wore floppy grey ears. Undone, it fell open to show a palmful of starry sand.

John James had been ill for some time, the potato cupboard racked nightly with what sounded like a dowager’s deadly cough. Sensing it would please his father, he hunched forward for a closer look. Gold dust entered him on a breath. He sneezed hard, scattering the top two-thirds.

The marks he earned that night put the welt left by the mountain man’s knife to shame. Bone bruises to a one, his back and legs turned to fruit flesh—hard and green, then yellow, stretched shiny with juice. Of the men who raised their heads to his howling, not one lifted a finger in his defence. When the mountain man yelled down from his high bunk, it was for quiet, dammit, and nothing more. Bill Drown got in a last wallop before he drew back from the whimpering bundle and spun away. He left the door gaping behind him. Only then did one of the miners shift himself, dragging his dark blanket around him as he rose to kick it shut.

John James didn’t lay eyes on his father again until long after the bruises had healed. When Bill Drown finally did blow into
town, he headed straight for one of a hundred card tables to burn up whatever wealth he’d managed to unearth. It might’ve been that night—or one of several others like it—when he carried John James to the same corner bunk and presented him with a knife of his own. It was stubby, stuffed in a dark leather sheath that had been tooled with the crude face of a dog.

“A man is called upon to protect himself in this world.” Bill Drown turned his face to the fissured wall, thrusting his sharp behind out to take up the lion’s share of the bed. Balanced at the bunk’s edge, John James shoved the gift down his bootleg, sheath and all.

He’d worn it against his calf ever since. It was there now, worrying his ankle as he crouched beneath the boardwalk, awaiting the footfall he knew.

John James looked out on a world made of boots. Knee-high and filthy, they drove pathways through the ooze, this pair reeling, that pair careful, the owner sober or, more likely, drunk to a blank-faced stun. A blunt brown toe caught momentarily on a swag of brush, hacked from the surrounding hills and dragged down by the cartload to quell the rising muck. Thick heels thundered over a stretch of unopened tobacco crates. Rendered worthless in a moment of oversupply, they’d been thrown down to plug a sinkhole. In the dark, racing heart of the gold rush, value was a quicksilver thing.

Dead ahead, a slender pair flashed buttons below a sullied froth of hoisted lace. John James felt his heart skip. Women were few and far between in the city, dearest of luxuries to be had. Such a sight could set even a boy’s pulse racing—a motherless boy’s more than most. A glint of street lamp showed the overskirt to be a feverish shade of pink. A working woman, then, one of the dark beauties shipped up from beneath the world’s wide belt. Not
one of the rarest, the kind that came wrapped in grey or sparrow brown.

John James blinked, his eyelids hot, the balls beneath them cold. His limbs might pain him, his position trouble him, more if he allowed himself to think ahead a day or two, perhaps even so long as a fortnight, to the morning when Bill Drown would once again take to the yellow-veined hills. Not thinking ahead was the trick. There was this body—the body of John James Drown—at play or at peril or at rest. Beyond that, there was the next best chance at a meal. Crouching, waiting, he had eaten his fill within the past eight hours, and so was less than desperate for food. The cold wouldn’t kill him and nobody knew he was there. Comfortable or not, this was rest.

Sooner or later his father would come. John James would know him first by ear, then, as Bill Drown forsook boardwalk for boggy street, by eye. His state of mind would be easy enough to gauge: high plunging steps told of a manic mood upheld, whereas a dragging gait warned of its aftermath, the rampant, unknowable slope. If it were the former, John James would show himself, caper a little, openly tag along. Otherwise he’d keep a safe distance. When Bill Drown had lost a pile, and sometimes even when he’d won, he’d been known to strip out his belt and chase his son through the streets, forcing John James to take refuge in one of a hundred slits and crannies—the whole dank district a honeycomb he’d made his own.

So why hunker beneath the boardwalk at all? Why not slip off, find a way to fill his belly, return alone to the mountain man’s and bury himself deep among the clustering spuds? He knew only that he ached. From the pressure of the boards above him, from the chill of the mud below. From hoping for a glimpse of his father, even if it was just the back of him, winding away.

Bill Drown shoved open the mountain man’s door two days shy of Christmas—their first in the slanting city on the bay. John James and a dozen flea-sore men looked up from their breakfast bowls. The man in the door frame was soaked. Behind him, a slate scree of rain. His eyes skipped the length of the crowded table, alighting briefly on the son he hadn’t seen in a month much as they did on everyone else—mostly new blood, one or two still having troubled themselves with a morning shave. Bill Drown let a rift open in his own dark beard.

“Gripp,” he said, stepping inside and clapping a palm on the mountain man’s shoulder, “my arrears.” A clerk’s term, plainly out of place. It fluttered in John James’s ears, an echo of that other life, his father’s blue-black fingers at the close of every day.

Gripp may not have been familiar with the word, but he knew well enough the meaning of the small buckskin pouch Drown let drop on the table before him. A suspension of spoons at the thud of what could only be the real stuff hitting plank. The mountain man nodded, beard to breastbone, his whiskers and wool shirt two grades of bled-out grey.

Bill Drown widened his wet smile. The sight of his teeth hurt John James. He lowered his eyes, focusing on the last yellow lump in his bowl. His father loomed, his fingers a sudden, blunt rake through John James’s hair, water streaming from his coat cuff to shock the boy’s scalp and waken its host of nits.

“Will I serve myself, innkeeper?” The voice cheerful, the combing fingers hard. In the corner of John James’s vision, the colourless bulk of the mountain man rose.

After eating his fill, Bill Drown ploughed into his bunk and slept for twenty-two straight hours. John James came and went, never
straying far. By the time his father woke, dawn was near and the rain had let up for what felt like the first time in memory. The two of them walked out together in their customary way—Drown neither inviting John James nor objecting when he tagged along.

It was a short stroll to the docks, where they stood staring out over the darkened bay. Abandoned vessels bobbed, their crews having legged it for the hills.

“Fools,” Bill Drown murmured. “Madmen.”

John James held his tongue, knowing to let the explanation, if there was to be any, come on its own.

“That’s what easterners call those of us who leave the daily grind for the goldfields.” His father spat, foamy by his boot tip. “Grunts and bosses, not a freethinking man among them. And the South is no better. Maybe if your daddy sets you up on the family plantation, but even then, what kind of sorry bastard wants to be tied to a plot of land?” He dropped into a squat, taking hold of John James by the wrist. “I dug one hell of a hole this time.”