by Tom Lin
“Shoot,” the prophet called out from the room.
The man obeyed and fired as the innkeeper was staggering to his feet and the bullet caught the hapless man by his collarbone and sent him crashing back to the floor.
“Good,” the prophet said.
The man with the bullet in his thigh swore and made to fire again and Ming shot him through his jaw. Two rounds left. Ming heard a strange melody coming from behind him and only after a moment did he recognize its source. The prophet had begun singing to himself. Ming stepped out into the hallway, found the man he’d shot through the door writhing on the ground, and killed him. One round left. He drew a bead on the crumpled figure at the foot of the stairs, cocked the hammer of his revolver, and shot that man dead too.
It was silent in the tavern save for the prophet’s singing. He had come to the top of the stairs and now seemed to be looking down at Ming. He was singing an old hymn.
Ming gazed up at him. “You all right?”
“Yes,” the prophet said. “My hour was not yet come.”
“Thank ye,” Ming said.
“Ain’t me that done it.”
On the bartop lay a wanted poster torn from where it had been pinned. The poster promised a thousand-dollar reward for the arrest and delivery of M. Tsu, the assassin of one James Ellis of the Central Pacific Railroad Company, and of one Judah Ambrose of Salt Lake, and of many others unknown to this Sheriff. A murderous Chinese: Hair, black, wears no queue. Eyes, black. Height, 5 feet 11 inches. Weight, 180 pounds. A known murderer and a wanted outlaw from Sacramento, California, taller than most Chinese, to be approached with utmost caution. Traveling with a blind coolie, elderly. The above reward will be paid for his capture and delivery to Sheriff Charles Dixon, of Unionville.
“Unionville,” Ming said, a fiendish grin spreading across his face.
So Dixon had given himself away. Ada’s father must have sent him there after Ming’s escape, told him to keep an ear to the ground for this murderous Chinese. And the bastard had managed to become sheriff there too.
“A band of greedy hopefuls,” the prophet said from upstairs, interrupting his thoughts.
“Aye.” Ming inspected the sketch of himself on the wanted poster. The man looked nothing like him. “Charles Dixon sent em,” Ming read aloud to the prophet. “Crooked sheriff I told you bout in them Sierras. You recall?”
“No,” came the old man’s reply.
“Spose I ain’t told you,” Ming said, half to himself. “Well, he’s in Unionville now.” He folded the poster up neatly and tucked it between the pages of his notebook, then flipped through to his list of names and penciled in Unionville beside Dixon’s name. He’d check his map later, plot out a route. “Come on down, old man,” he called up the stairs. “We don’t got much time fore folks come by to have a word with us.”
The prophet obliged. Ming left him at the bar and went upstairs again, taking care to avoid slipping on the greasy slicks of blood. He passed through the open door with its bullet holes and retrieved his pack. He patted down the three dead men upstairs. Two knives and a pound of powder between them. He stuffed these into his pack, returned to the tavern, and went behind the bar, where he emptied the register into his pack, the coins jingling as they fell. Then he patted down the dead man downstairs. Four pounds of lead, a set of bullet molds, another two pounds of powder. All of it into the pack.
He rose to his feet and surveyed the empty tavern. It was silent. He went behind the bar again and took down a bottle of whiskey.
“Time to go,” the prophet called from outside. Ming shoved the bottle into his pack and cinched it shut.
When Ming walked out of the tavern, the prophet was already atop his horse. He untied his own horse, climbed into the saddle, and spurred hard.
6
You ain’t remember me.”
They sat by the dying remains of a fire kindled from dry skeletons of sagebrush and short lengths of greasewood. They had ridden all through the night and the bright day afterward and had made camp where sunset found them. Ming prodded the embers with a twig and looked at the prophet, gazing sightlessly up at the stars.
“No,” the prophet agreed. He regarded Ming with his clouded eyes. “Did you think I would?”
“Spose so,” Ming said. “If you ain’t remember me, why’d you come with me?”
“I knew that it was necessary.”
The prophet’s face was at once ancient and ageless. Though time had marked its hours and days upon the old man’s sun-hardened visage it hadn’t found any purchase there. He was as living stone and when he spoke the years vanished from the gaunt hollows of his cheeks and the sunken pits of his eyes, as flies rise from the back of a sleeping beast who has begun to stir. Here was a man unburdened by memory, a man for whom the unspun threads of the future were as bright and clear as the past was vague and frayed.
“Tell me what you hoped I would remember,” the prophet said, his voice clear and untroubled.
“Hell,” Ming said. For a moment he felt as though he were a child again, tongue-tied and mute, full of words never to find expression. He looked down at his hands, interlaced his fingers. In the firepit the embers undressed themselves again and again in cascading sheets of ash. The air was cold and hard. “We knew each other,” Ming began again. “In the Sierras. That man I killed out on the railroad, James Ellis, he was our boss, real sonofabitch. We were dying up there,” he said, tilting his head to the west. His voice was low and strange. He told the old man about the snowslides that carried men by the dozen down into the frozen valleys and about the men who were found on some after-storm mornings, their eyelashes glazed with hoarfrost. About Ellis and his pickaxe handle, motivating with blows the sullen few who were tired or stupid enough to lay down their sledges and rest. About the rotating handful of Chinese who passed through the prophet’s tent each morning, asking after people they hoped were still alive. He studied the prophet’s face. “You recall the name Silas Root? My caretaker?”
The old man repeated the name in a low voice, as though trying the syllables out for the first time. Then he shook his head. The name was unfamiliar to him, he said.
As long as Silas was still alive, Ming continued, he was bound to Ellis, to the rails, to servitude. Every day he would come to the prophet, asking whether Silas had died. Ming had reckoned Silas was not long for this world. He was an old man by then, sickly and weak. “Then,” he said, “one day you told me he had. With him dead I reckoned it was only a matter of time before Ellis got word to kill me. So I ran.”
The two men fell quiet for a spell.
“I don’t know,” Ming said at last. “I spose I hoped you’d remember you helpin me.”
The prophet shook his head. “This I do not remember. But I know you now and here.” He smiled warmly. “You are a man out of bounds,” he said.
It was in the prophet’s character to speak in riddles.
“What do you mean?” Ming asked.
“In the tavern. I said my time had not yet come. This I can still remember. I only meant that I would not die then. And it was borne out.” He turned his salt-white eyes to the fire. “A man is immortal until the moment of his death. And then he is vulnerable to all things. But until this moment he lives forever, and nothing in all creation can lay him low. Those men in the tavern who had come to kill you. It was their time. It is good that you killed them, but know that it could have been anyone, anything. It could have been God himself who reached down and smote them where they stood. But you are a man out of bounds. You should have died that day in the mountains, when you ran, yet here you live and breathe.” The prophet tipped his head up as if gazing at the moon. “I know the time of every man not yet perished. And mine as well.” He looked back at Ming. “But yours is shifting, fickle, changing from moment to moment.”
Ming opened his mouth to reply but in that blue desert night there were no words. The fire was going out, had gone out, was growing cold. The horses stood as wooden figurines
against the night sky. Beside him sat the prophet, blind as a newborn pup, guarding those mute ashes in the firepit. Ming lay down on his bedroll and found sleep opiate and thick.
7
Only a few hours later Ming woke uneasily. A restlessness in his limbs kept him from sleeping and even when he closed his eyes still he saw that enormous glyphic landscape dancing around him. At last he sat up and prodded the prophet awake and asked him if he needed to sleep.
“No,” came the reply.
“Strange old man,” Ming muttered to himself. “Let’s get moving,” he said.
They traveled together under a fishscale moon, following small furrows that wove along the folds of the land, natural trails carved by the thousands of cattle driven westward before them. Their hoofprints were still visible in some places, imprint fossils remembering the pressure of beasts. In time as the moon dropped over the western horizon a young sun rose to warm their backs. The only sound was the horses’ breathing and the rhythm of gear jostling in Ming’s pack. Everything else was swallowed whole by the resplendent emptiness of that vast landscape through which they passed.
After two days and two nights of travel their horses were fast growing gaunt with hunger and thirst but still Ming spurred them on. He called out to the prophet behind him and asked when their horses would die.
“Not today,” the prophet answered.
“And tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow.”
Ming nodded to himself, tipped his hat back to shade the nape of his neck. For a long time he stared down at the withers of his horse, watching sheets of muscle twist and ripple under a paper-thin skin. He tugged off one of his gloves and held his bare hand out under the sunlight, moved his fingers as though playing a piano, then made a fist, feeling the hurt of old scarred sinews drawing taut in his hand. There was in his body a memory of labor, of force, of weight and motion. He pulled the glove back onto his tanned hand and turned round to the small figure of the prophet, seated motionless atop his horse. There were memories in that ancient body too. Perhaps those blank white eyes even preserved a dull memory of seeing.
There was also in Ming’s body a memory of his lovely Ada. How to take her in his arms, how to brush her hair from her face, how to cradle her body with his own. There were other memories of her in his body too, bitter ones. How she would shake and stiffen, plagued by nightmares she feared as premonitions. All these memories lingered beyond the reach of language, denied from his waking mind but preserved in his nerves and sinew. He followed their shadows down, down, and down again. At bottom each was hollow. And when at last he surfaced from these goings-down there was not a thought left in his head.
The landscape around him had changed during these reveries. All day they had traveled and the sun drew near the earth now. Time moved strangely on these barren sands.
A question came to him. “Prophet,” he called. “Do you remember what I told you? Why I’m doing this?”
“No,” the old man said, his voice faint. “But I know.”
“For a girl.”
“Yes.”
The horses toiled beneath them. The sun blushed and shimmered before him. Ming did not speak for a while.
“Is she still alive?” he asked then.
“Yes.”
Ming controlled his relief. “And will she die before I get there?” he asked.
The prophet was silent for a moment. “No,” he said finally.
Ming let out a deep sigh. “Thank ye,” he murmured. So she was still alive.
The sun hung huge in the sky, like a yolk in suspension for an eternity, until at last some distant peak pierced its envelope and the light dribbled down below the plane of the world, plunging the sky headlong into blue evening.
In the thin light of a rising moon another question formed in his mind. “Old man,” he said. “Is she happy?”
The prophet was silent so long Ming twisted around in his saddle to see whether he had fallen asleep. His eyes were half-closed and his ancient fingers seemed to be playing at a phantom loom spread out before him.
Ming repeated his question.
A smile came to the old man’s face and his fingers ceased their fluttering. “Yes,” he said.
“Yes?” Ming said, his voice tinged with disbelief.
“Aye.”
He fingered the reins as though counting rosary beads. “Does she know I’m coming home?” he asked in a quiet voice, half-hoping the prophet would not hear.
“Man without bounds,” the prophet said, “this I do not know.”
Ming let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
They stopped with a few hours of moonlight to spare and built a small rabbitbrush fire that did little to keep the cold of the desert night at bay. The horses were now crazed with thirst.
The prophet walked in wide arcs, ranging through the darkness, pausing every so often to stoop and pass his gnarled hands over the dust. He returned to the fire and sat down. “There will be water tomorrow,” he pronounced.
“Where?”
“I will know when it is time.”
Ming tended to the dying fire. The prophet was singing a little to himself in strange melodies without cadence or tone. When Ming asked him at last what he was singing the prophet said it was an old lullaby.
“Who taught it to you?” Ming asked.
The prophet said that he had always known it.
“What does it mean?”
The prophet said that it meant what all old lullabies meant, which was to say nothing at all. And he said that these were songs without meaning or tune, songs meant only to be sung slow and soft at close of day.
8
By sunrise of the following morning the horses were rested enough to begin again. They had been a long time without water now and as they walked spittle swung from their cracked lips in thick white ropes that snapped and fell foamy on the desert floor. The two men rode through the afternoon and by early evening Ming was beginning to doubt the prophet’s promise of finding water.
At last on the horizon there came a scattering of shapes and forms, the shaded bulk of a town long deserted. Most of the buildings had fallen in on themselves. The prophet indicated that they should stop and Ming led his horse to the edge of the ghost town and tied the animal to the skeletal remains of a fence. He drew his gun and set off down what had once surely been Main Street. The prophet sat monkish and unmoving atop his horse.
“There’s water here?” Ming asked.
“Yes,” said the prophet.
Ming scanned the blasted town. He could see no well.
“You will find water in the church,” the prophet said, as though anticipating his question. “Someone has dug a well.”
“Who?”
The prophet did not answer.
Ming started down the road with six rounds in his gun. Ten yards from the blackened ruins of the chapel he turned back to the old man still seated atop his horse. “Prophet,” he called. “Will I die here?”
“No,” the prophet answered.
“Thank ye,” Ming said, and went in.
The air inside the church was warm and heavy and absolutely still. The rafters were charred and the pews ash-tipped, witness marks of a fire that long ago had ravaged the holy structure. In some places the roof had been burned away entirely and through these apertures the low evening sun set down slanting columns of incandescent dust, phantom buttresses for that scorched church. Light played through gaps in the walls between rough-hewn timbers as though filtering through stained glass. Ming stood awhile in the aisles, looking up at the broken roof.
He walked farther into the church, toward the collapsed pulpit. Here the burned floorboards had been ripped up and the bare earth beneath was dark and overturned. The air was cooler, damp. A pit ran some five or six feet down. Ming tightened his grip on his gun and stepped forward, peering into the murky depths. With a start he realized he was looking at a skeletonized woman, dressed in rags, her dry bones held together by fra
gments of withered sinew. She sat leaning against the wall of the pit, her jaw hanging open in an expression of perpetual awe. Ming approached cautiously and let himself down into the pit. By the skeleton there was a smaller, deeper hole only two hands across and beside it a bailing bucket tied to a length of rawhide. So the prophet was right. Ming lowered the bucket into the primitive well and raised it brimming with murky, silty water. He looked straight at the woman’s shrunken sockets and a shudder ran down his spine.
The prophet had dismounted when Ming stepped back out into the evening half-light. He placed the bucket before the horses and they bent to it and noisily drank. When the bucket was empty he took it back to the well in the church and refilled it. It was four trips before the horses were sated. The shadows of the two men and their horses stretched long and lurid and when the sun was just about set they left their horses where they were tied and made camp under the decaying roof of the old church. Ming gathered lengths of half-burned wood from the pulpit and built a thin fire that shrank as the night air bristled sharp and chill.
“That woman down there has been dead seven years,” the prophet said.
Ming glanced at the corner of the church where the dead woman sat in her pit and saw only a shifting and depthless dark. “Did you know she was there?”
“Not at first. But now.”
They were quiet for a while. The fire crackled and grew smaller still. When it had nearly gone out Ming studied the prophet’s face and asked him what was next.
The old man turned his gaze west and then earthward, as though he could see the sun sliding beneath their feet. “Elko,” he said.
