“Take another piece of salt,” he told Sarah behind him, and then they were halfway around and he began looking seriously for a good break in the cliff that would take them up out of here. The first was too steep. The next one, fifty yards on, was just right, smooth and easy all the way up, and for that reason, because it was too obvious, he passed it. The next didn’t go up. It went straight in, about three horses wide, turning before he could see where it led, and for a reason he did not understand, he took it.
Where the passage turned, it grew wider, and when they were out of sight of the entrance behind them, the clomping of the horses echoed. He looked up at the strip of sky far above them. He looked ahead where the passage forked, and he took the one on the right, beginning to worry now that they weren’t going anywhere, that they’d soon reach a dead end and need to turn and go back. He decided that as soon as they came to a spot where they wouldn’t be able to turn the horses, they would stop and go back, but whenever the passage narrowed, he could see ahead to where it opened out again, and he rode through, his legs crossed over the saddle horn, rocks scraping the leather of the saddle. The passage forked again, and again he took the one on the right, not wanting to make things complicated and confuse himself in case they needed to find their way back. Once his horse felt so closed in that it tried to rear up and turn and he had to stop and calm it, patting it gently on the neck, whispering softly. Then he reached where the walls came together so close to his head that he felt constricted, dismounting as soon as the passage opened out, leading the horse by its reins. He looked back at Claire holding Sarah as she rode and knew that close places bothered her, and he wished there were a way for her to get down as well. The rock walls were cold and damp as in a cave. The passage angled down a little, forking again, and to break the pattern he went to the left, certain now that they would soon need to turn back, deciding to go on anyhow since they’d come this far and might as well finish what was left. He imagined what all these forks in the passage must look like from above. He looked at his watch. They’d been at this quite a while. He looked ahead. The passage turned. And as he came around the bend, sunlight struck him hard in the eyes, forcing him to shield his eyes.
Perhaps it was the effect of the heat haze from the sun, or perhaps the contrast with what they’d just come through, but as he led his horse out into the open, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“What is it?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know. It shouldn’t be here,” he answered, fumbling with his map. “Look. Here’s the sheep desert. Here’s the country on this side of the wall. If the surveyors thought to mark something as small as that line shack back there, they’d sure as hell have thought to mark something as big as this.”
They were standing at the upper end of a long low river valley that stretched away for as far as they could see, steep cliffs on either side, then gentle wooded slopes, then the river far below them glinting in the sun, and the whole scene was like pictures he had seen of deep narrow mountain valleys in the Andes, the trees and meadows a bright rich green that shimmered in the heat haze as if in a mirage. But the valley was clearly marked on the map. That wasn’t what bothered him. What did, so large and obvious in a large open meadow by the river that his eyes were drawn unavoidably to it, was the long narrow rectangle of a town down there, one main street dividing it, side streets dividing it again, this time into squares, a town big enough for two or three thousand people but no sign of movement anywhere.
“Something’s wrong. You must be looking at the wrong map,” Claire said.
“No,” he said, taking out his compass, lining up the map with it. “No, there’s no mistake. The valley’s clearly marked all right. It’s just that there isn’t any town on it.”
“But that’s impossible. How could anybody survey all this and not make a note of the town?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes they map this country by plane. Sometimes they just climb up on a high point and map everything around from there. It could be they just didn’t notice it or maybe they were in such a hurry that they didn’t remember to mention it.”
But he didn’t believe either one, and the only explanation that finally even half-satisfied him was that they had left it off the map deliberately, letting historians and state officials know but keeping the news from everyone else, not wanting souvenir hunters to come up here and destroy the place the way the Indian pueblo ruins had been destroyed in Arizona.
Maybe. But he still didn’t really believe it, and he was already leading his horse down the steep stone slope to the trees below before he realized how much the place was drawing him. After tying his horse to a fir tree, he climbed back up to help Claire dismount and carry Sarah down to the trees. Then he came back up once more to lead the two horses down. It was dark and cool in under there after the brightness of the sheep desert, and he gave Sarah another sip of water, told her to take another piece of salt. Then they all remounted, Claire still holding Sarah, and started down. It was like being in a park, no undergrowth, just tall thick evergreens rising up evenly spaced all around them, branches not beginning until well up over their heads, the forest floor a smooth cushioned mat of dead brown pine needles. In a while the air grew chill enough that he needed to button his jacket again.
The river made hardly any sound when they came to it, and he registered then what he’d been sensing all along, that aside from the hooves of the horses there hadn’t been any sound in the forest either, no autumn birds singing, no animals scuttering over the pine needles or across the branches of the trees. And the chill he’d been feeling wasn’t just from the air. It was the place itself, the sense that something was wrong.
But while the river was almost soundless, more like a whisper than anything else, it was wide and swift and deep, and they rode down along it, looking for a ford. To the left there were tumbled cabins among the trees. Farther down there were logs set out to form the foundations of cabins that had never been built. Then they came to a pale cracked listing wagon, the spokes of its crumbled wheels splayed out beneath it. They circled it, reaching a place in the river where rocks and silt and gravel had gathered enough to form a ford, crossing it, the water knee-high on the horses, spotting a huge rusted metal pan down there under the water.
For a moment he was afraid that the wide motion of the water would spook the horses, make them rear up and try to dump them, maybe Sarah, but then before he expected they were across and he was feeling easier out in the bright open of the meadow away from the trees. He stopped to let the horses drink, something he knew he should have done earlier but that his feeling in the woods had not let him. The horses drank until he had to force them back, fearing they’d get sick. Then looking at the tall green grass of the meadow, so unlike the scrub grass of the sheep desert or any other grass that they had come through, he imagined how obvious the path that the horses would make through it would be from the air. Deciding to stay along the riverbank, he noticed the rusty head of a shovel, its handle long since rotted away. He reached a road that angled off to the right through the grass toward the town, the grass barely ankle-high on the horses, mixed in with patches of dust and the vague outlines of wheel ruts, and if the town was as old as the cabins he had seen in the trees behind him, the road shouldn’t still have been here, let alone the town itself.
It was about a hundred yards ahead of them, the buildings mostly low and slant-roofed except for the two-story buildings down both sides of the main street. There were occasional shacks now, and then they reached the outskirts, and the buildings were listing, their doors rotted off their hinges, windows broken, but they weren’t made of logs like the cabins on the other side of the river. Their wood was flat and even-planed, and there were wooden sidewalks propped up over the dirt of the street, and there was the tall spire of a church down at the far end, and if the planks now were warped and cracked and the sidewalk partially collapsed and the crucifix on the spire snapped dangling, it was obvious that once there had been a good deal of pride in their making. MARERRO, a sign said, blown down into the middle of the street. The word was etched deeply into the wood. And below it, POPULATION 4000, the number almost indiscernible, slashed out, “350” cut awkwardly under it. They passed a candy store, a tobacco shop, a drugstore, two laundries, one directly across from the other, a barber shop, a dry goods store, their signs fallen down in front of their doors or still painted neatly on a few surviving windows. They were halfway through town before he stopped them and looked around and finally dismounted.
MARERRO HOUSE, a sign said in front of the biggest building. It was wider than the rest and taller with a false front of wood on top of its two stories. There were big dusty windows on both sides of the double door, a row of smaller ones on the second story, a balcony jutting out,. Hitching his horse to the rail in front, he stepped onto the sidewalk toward the entrance. There wasn’t any sound at all now, not the creaking of signs in the wind or the whistling of a breeze through broken windows, nothing, so that when his foot cracked through the sidewalk, the noise was startling. He thought irrationally of snakes and yanked his foot out, ripping his pant cuff.
“Christ,” he said, and the word was like dust in his mouth.
He tested the boards this time before he put any weight on them, walking carefully across, the wood bending under him. He opened one of the double doors, then an inner door, and looked in. The bar took up the whole left wall, a dusty cobwebbed mirror behind it, a dull copper railing along the bottom for a foot rest, cuspidors in the middle and at each end. There were tables and chairs in the middle, some with bottles and glasses still on them, the chairs pushed back as if people had only a moment ago stood and left them. A dance-hall stage against the back, a piano in one corner of it, dusty ragged red velvet curtains bunched together on both sides, a stairway along the right wall that disappeared up through a break in the ceiling to the second floor.
Marerro, he thought to himself, turning to Claire and Sarah in the street, saying, “It’s all right. We can go on in,” his words like dust again. He entered, glancing at the candle-studded wagon-wheel chandelier hanging from the ceiling. He followed the path of light until it ended in the middle of the room.
“Open the other door,” he told Claire as they came in behind him, and the extra light showed the thick dust on the tables and the bottles and the glasses. And on the floor, he noticed, seeing behind him where he had made tracks through the dust to where he was standing.
He went over to the stage, floorboards creaking under him, examining the burned-down candles that had been set along the rim with metal reflectors behind them for foot-lights. Marerro, he thought again, Claire and Sarah coming behind him. “Who the hell or what was Marerro?”
12
“He was a Mexican,” a voice said behind him.
It paralyzed him. For a moment he couldn’t move or breathe or anything, and then something snapped and he was turning, gun drawn, but Claire and Sarah were in the way, and as he lunged to the right, crouching, aiming, he saw the tall grizzled white-haired old man standing in the open doorway pointing the shotgun at him, and the big dog beside the old man was braced, its teeth bared to leap, and the old man was saying, “Hey now, sonny. Point that gun the other way. I’ve no doubt you could hit me, but my fingers are solid on these triggers and before I dropped I’d hit you too and if that didn’t finish you the dog surely would, so just point that gun the other way.”
But he didn’t. He just kept crouching, aiming, his finger tensing on the trigger, and the old man was saying, “I could sic the dog on the little girl. Then you wouldn’t know where to shoot first, and I could drop you for sure. Come on, it’s a standoff. Point the gun the other way.”
But he still didn’t move, tensed, hand shaking, and the old man was staring at him nervously, suddenly shrugging, lowering the shotgun, uncocking the hammers, setting it against the wall inside the door. “All right, if it’s up to me to make the first move, there, I’ve done it. Now it’s your turn.”
He relaxed a little. “What about the dog?” It was still braced to leap, and all the old man had to do was say “Hush” once and the dog was immediately down on its stomach.
He relaxed even more, straightening, breathing.
“I’m not asking you to put the gun away or anything,” the old man said. “Just point it the other way.”
And he finally did, uncocking it, lowering it by his side.
The old man grinned, showing jagged yellow teeth. “That’s the stuff, sonny. The way your hand was shaking, I was sure we were both dead where we stood.” And then he started laughing, his mouth a gaping hole in his face. His skin had passed beyond the wrinkle stage, the flesh under it eaten up, so that it had smoothed out and conformed now to his jawbones and cheekbones and forehead, gaunt and sallow like the perfectly preserved face of a mummy, and his ragged pants and shirt and jacket hung loose on him as if the flesh underneath them were gone as well, leaving only bones and skin, and his laugh was high-pitched and cackling.
“Yes sir, both dead where we stood,” he abruptly finished. “Marerro was a Mexican. He came up here and found a twenty-three-pound gold nugget. When the rest of them came up here to strike it rich just like he did, he told them he knew where there was country around with nuggets just as big as the first, so when they built this town they named it after him. Then they caught him messing with a white woman and they lynched him and afterward they felt so bad about losing all that gold that they kept the town named after him anyhow. It got to be a kind of joke.”
“You make it sound like you were here.”
“Almost, sonny. But the town was built in 1879 and I might be old but not that old, not quite. I read all about it in the records at the courthouse. That’s just down the street. Your little girl not feeling well, is she?”