Again the Father’s footsteps have led the Tracker to the window of the old adobe barn. Inside, the child wife stands fondling some small, still creature—a squirrel by the shade of its fur. The Tracker watches until she sets it down and returns to her bench, then lets his gaze wander the framed scene of the barn. At length it comes to rest on a family of ducks.
Hammer had wanted him to shoot the canvasbacks, but the Tracker showed him a smarter, cleaner way. Entering the soup of
the marsh from behind a blind of reeds, he bent his knees and sank to the level of his lips. A loose crown of rushes made a diminutive island of his head. He pulled himself slowly through water and weeds, half walking, half paddling, taking care not to bear weight on his feet and become mired in the rooty ooze.
On the surface, the woven mass that housed his breath drifted toward the resting flock. When he was within arm’s reach of a complete family, he exhaled silently and submerged, leaving the crown to float empty. Eyes open in the murk, he rolled to gaze up into a thicket of twiggy legs. Webbed feet fluttered. A pair of adults bobbed directly overhead, one with a male’s darker breast. Close at hand, several ducklings sat high in the water, scarcely breaking its skin.
It was then, staring up into those flecked, indistinct underbellies, that the Tracker first contemplated leaving this life. He could reach down and link arms with the weeds beneath him. He need never walk the earth again.
Instead, he reached up with both hands, grabbed the mother and father by their legs and dragged them under. Holding both in his hard left fist, he plucked and added ducklings to the thrashing bouquet.
When he burst up gasping into the air, the rest of the flock exploded into flight. He held the canvasbacks under until they ceased to resist, then rose from the marsh into Hammer’s delighted gaze.
BENDY CAUGHT HIS LAST GLIMPSE
of Philomena’s glossy back in early September. By mid-October what little money he’d managed to save from his cut of the nightly take was gone, offered up to Gripp’s stinking soup kettle and rat-lively walls. The mountain man was no longer content to let him lie on his back all day. Bendy was healed—every break knitted, good as new. He could get himself a job, or he could get out.
There was work to be had at the docks. A day’s back-breaking labour paid roughly what he’d made on a good morning as a child, but the idea of cutting capers in the street seemed vaguely shameful now that he’d taken part in a travelling show.
The job suited bodies created opposite to his own: barrel-trunked trolls shuffling low to the ground, or men made of both height and brawn, bulls rearing up on their hind legs. They laughed at the reedy look of him, fell silent when they saw what sheer will could do. He kept up with the crew by day; by night he lay under the bug-jumping covers at Gripp’s—paid for, secure—nursing his screaming joints.
True sleep came seldom that winter. More often he tossed under a dark rag-work blanket of noise. Sighs and breathy snores,
undercover yankings, the occasional night-terror yell. Rain on the roof shakes and in seven pails—a tinny ring when they’d just been emptied, the timbre gentling as the levels rose.
After bed and what passed for board, he had a little money left over. Cash in a pocket runs through the fingers like silt. Cash stuffed deep in a boot, however, can become a nest of sorts. If asked what he was saving for, Bendy would’ve been hard pressed to give it a name. He’d know it when it showed itself, like every major junction in his life so far.
This one came on paper, a sheet of the
Alta California
one of the overseers had laid aside. He was lying on his bunk, reading by the flame of a tallow stump, when a word crackled through him like the touch of a longed-for hand.
Wanted
. He shifted his fingertip and read on.
Young skinny wiry fellows not over eighteen
.
Me, he thought, the word pulsing down through the filth beneath his fingernail, inserting itself into the text.
Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily
.
Expert? Near enough. More than willing. Eager.
Orphans preferred
.
This he heard rather than read, the letters thrumming with a voice of their own. He scarcely dared read on.
Wages $25 per week
.
He caught his breath.
Apply, Central Overland Express, Alta Bldg., Montgomery Street
.
He lifted his forefinger and retraced the advertisement, giving it half a dozen passes before he felt he’d seen enough. Sitting up, he swung his feet—still in their boots, always in their boots—down to the floor. It was a good hour until dawn, and no office would open its doors until some time after that. Still, he rose. He’d miss a morning’s work at the dockyards. The thought
had a long bright tail—he was done with grunt work. The change had come.
“St. Joseph, Missouri, clean through to Sacramento.” The man with the shoe-brush moustaches swept his hand across the wall-mounted map. “That’s nineteen hundred and sixty-six miles in two hundred and forty hours. Ten days.”
The numbers meant little to Bendy, but he knew by the shiver in the man’s voice he was meant to be impressed. What did hold some significance for him was the map. It was the first time he’d seen the whole thing—a country in the making pinned up before his eyes.
“Excuse me, sir,” he heard himself ask, “does this map show New Orleans?”
The man’s finger took an angled course, unable to resist tracing the route back to St. Joseph before turning southward. “Here,” he said, reaching the black spot at the Mississippi’s mouth. “Do you have kin there?”
Bendy closed his eyes and saw her, plain as day. She was standing on the wide verandah of that old mansion, her shopping basket on her arm. And then she wasn’t. “No, sir,” he said quietly, “no kin.”
He would answer many questions that morning. How old was he? Sixteen. How much did he weigh? One-fifteen or so, last he knew. That had been a year ago, when he was still at Wicklow’s—he and the other stable hands balancing themselves on the feed scales on a slow day. If he’d gained weight since then, it couldn’t be much. If anything, his convalescence and Gripp’s filthy stews had whittled him a little. The dock work certainly hadn’t built any bulk, instead turning him stringy, like an overboiled bird.
Did he fancy himself a good horseman? Could he endure great hardship? Was he accustomed to a life spent out of doors? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
The man’s face darkened then, becoming severe. “Do you drink?”
“No, sir.”
“Not at all?”
“Not once.”
Again and again Bendy felt his eyes drawn to the sprawl of the map—specifically to its far edge, the direction the ornate cross in the top corner identified as
E
. West’s opposite. The land Bill Drown had so keenly despised. At last he worked up the courage to ask another question of his own. “Sir, is there any work to be had along the line?”
“Along the line?” The man’s mouth contracted, drawing the dark brush down. “I’m hiring for the westernmost division, son.”
Bendy took a step closer, reached out and slid his own index finger along the route. “Yes, but what about—” He almost blushed to utter it aloud, recalling his father’s curled lip. He took a breath, blew it out across territories and states. “—the East?”
Stepping out of the Alta Building into morning light, Bendy finally knew where he was headed—all he needed was a way to get there. It was waiting for him when he got back to Gripp’s. A played-out panner, back from working over the tailings of a played-out cut. Bendy took his measure in a moment. If there was anything more than a pinch of low-grade dust on the panner’s sorry person, he’d eat a finger off his own right hand.
Gripp and the newcomer were alone, bent together across the plank table like old women grousing over tea—only they were silent, and the teapot was a cloudy bottle of gin. Bendy sat down
at a little distance, his weight on the bench turning Gripp’s moonstone gaze his way. Neither man offered a glass, so he wasn’t obliged to nurse a drink he didn’t want.
Normally he would’ve kept to himself—perched on the sagging front step or stretched out on his bunk—but this time he had good reason to take part. On his way in, he’d noticed the panner’s horse, a bald-faced yellow cayuse with white socks on her forelegs and stockings on her hind. She’d been let go—coat mud-streaked and dull, shoes worn to slivers. The panner had tethered her in the full sun without water. She was panting, a fact that let Bendy see the true animal beneath the neglect. She was deep-hearted, possessed of a good set of lungs.
Lingering by her head a moment, murmuring, Bendy showed her his hand before laying down several long, investigative strokes. She stood firm for him, let out a telling sigh. He crossed to the rain barrel and filled a bucket. It was a test as well as a gift, and when she thrust her mouth in up to the nostrils, drinking hard and long, she passed.
When the gin was three-quarters down—far enough to have loosened the panner’s tongue and lowered the mountain man’s eyelids, but not so far that they’d started fretting about where the next bottle would come from—Bendy made his move.
“That your nag out front?”
The panner squinted up from the pair of fresh shots he was dribbling out. “Nag? She ain’t no—”
“I’ll take her off your hands.” Short and sharp. Let this kind get up a head of steam and they’d talk themselves to where you wanted them, overshoot and end up back where they began.
The panner made a show of drawing himself up. “Now hold on a minute here—”
“Cash.” Bendy let his gaze slip to the bottle and rest there a
moment, then reached down and began working loose his boot. The panner strained forward a little. Bendy produced two-thirds of the paper nest he’d formed with his heel and began slowly, methodically, to flatten and fan out the bills. The panner’s answer was plain on his face, but he gave voice to it all the same.
“She’s called Nugget.”
Bendy nodded, pushing the money across the table. Like hell she is, he thought. Like hell.
He was packed in minutes and out Gripp’s splintery front door without so much as a so-long. He put off tending to the mare, not wanting to clean her up where the panner could catch sight of what he’d lost. Riding her at a walk through town, he couldn’t help feeling the pair of them were in disguise, weighted down by the evidence of lives now done. To pass out of the city would be a kind of passing away—one that preceded neither heaven nor hell, but a brand new birth, man and horse remade. But first a detour to the farrier’s, where they began righting the panner’s wrongs.
When the steamship
Antelope
set off that afternoon, Bendy and his mare were aboard. He was leaving San Francisco the same way he’d arrived—only now he was no longer a boy in thrall to his father, but a young man with reins in his hand. Another key difference—this ship took him inland, the first half inch along a line on a map, the one that had etched a corresponding groove in his brain. Moving up the Sacramento River instead of out to sea—into fresh, narrowing waters rather than an endless salt expanse—gave him a sense of direction, of having found the necessary path.
What could be simpler? He’d follow the Pony Express trail itself—or the foundations of it, anyway—until he reached its eastern end, stopping at each city, town or station to ask directions to
the next. He’d be expert, all right, by the time he got there. The men in charge out that way would have to hire him on. Chances were he’d be their only rider who’d learned the entire route through his own horse’s hooves.
The
Antelope
docked at Sacramento in the small hours. Bendy held the mare to a trot through the darkened streets, but let her run when they met open country. At a patch of tender pasture cut across by a stream, he dropped down and let her drink, then eat, her fill. Oblivious to the darkness and to his own fatigue, he brushed and curried her as she nosed along, freeing clods of dirt the size of knuckles, handfuls of hair. When she stood sated, he squatted and oiled her hooves, checking by feel the clinch nails on her new shoes. He stroked her brow until her eyes closed before setting to work on the knots in her tail. Kneeling by the starlit stream, he dipped his rag and rubbed the scurf from her filthy tack.
They passed the remainder of the night in a whispering copse. Bendy dozed under the saddle blanket, the mare’s legs becoming four bright saplings when his eyes fluttered open at the screech of an owl. He named her then, half waking, murmuring, “Stand.” She roused him at first light with the sound of her grazing, her keen lips inches from his ear.
DORRIE DREAMS:
Wolves. They’ve been waiting, biding their time, until the dog man’s pack withdrew. Now, as twilight gathers, the hills are crawling with them. I can make out several from my perch, bristling along the far escarpment, threading down through boulders, through brush. The numbers lie to the west—the wind having turned to waft its happy message that way—but they move across these eastern hills too.
A deep-chested male pads by close to the trunk of my juniper, nose thrust into the blood-rich breeze, eyes on the valley below. His mate comes hard on his heels, her flank brushing the very bush that hides the child.
The breeding pair do not scent her, nor do any of their pack—a couple of rangy yearlings leading four of this spring’s issue, fat-footed, overgrown pups. As the last of them files past the sage, a faint crackling issues from within. The pup hesitates, cocking his head. I caw, jagged and high, a note designed to trouble his ears. He looks up, spots me and shows a little fang. I sidle down my branch, draw a thin, silvery whine from between those glinting
teeth. It’s over before it begins. In the empty-headed way of the young, he suddenly recalls his purpose, the descent of his kind upon the field. He gives a growl for good measure, drops his snout into the current of rot and trots away.
A close call, yet I can’t help but be heartened by the child’s small stirring. She’s been holed up in there since the middle of last night. Hours ago, when I returned from my survey of the humans at their burying work, the bush was so silent I began to wonder if she’d crept from its cover and scuttled away. I listened for her shallow breath, but could hear nothing over the echoes of human tools. In the end I swooped down from my branch, claws extended, and raked through the bush’s crown. The child gasped and, on the exhale, released the softest of squeals. It was enough. I mounted to my post again.