Cape Hell

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Shield your eyes with your sleeve when you twist off the top,” he said. “We let the pressure drop, but the water’s still hot enough to poach a steer.”

  I climbed the ladder to the boiler, pausing twice to rest; in spite of all the exercise stoking the firebox, I’d yet to retrieve all my strength. The spout attached to the water tower was at the end of my reach. I braced a foot against the brass grab-rail, hooked a hand under the roof of the cab, and leaned out almost perpendicular to the locomotive, snatching the spout by its chain and swiveling it into place. I wore the leather gloves, but wrapped a rag around my hands before I bent to the boiler’s cap, which was about the size of the lid of a gallon jar of pickles and took twice as much effort to twist loose even with the aid of a wrench the size of a mule’s hind leg. Once it gave enough to do the rest with one hand, I slung my other arm across my eyes, leaned back, and jerked loose the cap, releasing a geyser of white water and steam whose heat I felt through the bandanna, my borrowed overalls, heavy flannel shirt, and long-handles. When it died down I lowered the spout into the opening and tugged on the cable that lifted the gate. Water pulsed through the crimped-together steel tubes like blood through an artery.

  Waiting for the boiler to fill, I took in the view. At my back rose the wall of wooded mountains, as black as the hills of Dakota, while in front of me the land sloped down to a green-and-brown shelf stretching for miles to the gulf, which I couldn’t quite see but could determine its existence by an open expanse of sky with nothing to obscure it but white clouds that seemed to touch the shore. It seemed to me I could smell the salt water, but that was imagination; miles of desert would have absorbed all the moisture and replaced it with the odor of earth scorched by the sun. Down track I saw the way we’d come, and a smudge of smoke belonging to the still-smoldering fires ignited by sparks from the Ghost’s wheels. Up track, their smoke vanished sometime since, piles of ash pierced by gaunt charred timbers marked the graves of the men and women (I thought of Joseph’s “I would not say ‘just’ of this woman”) who had lost their fight with cholera. The cleansing flames had spread as far as the rails, but after strolling along them and back, the engineer had reported the steel intact.

  “What about the ties?”

  “Burned through, a few. We’ll go slow and pray for the best.”

  Back on the ground, the box heating back up, the tender filled with freshly chopped wood and the pressure rising, I gripped the Whitney rifle and scanned the forest for signs of bandits, but Joseph said the miasma of death would likely keep them away. “A clean bullet, or the jerk of a noose, these things hold no terrors for them. They did not take up the work to perish in a wallow of their own sweat and vomit.”

  I’d begun to wonder if his tales of land-bound pirates hadn’t been glossed up a bit, like the stories of mountain lions stalking his family exclusively; but as we pulled forward I continued to divide my attention between the dense growth and the fire, with now the added detail of the burned ties.

  We moved at walking pace, the wheels barely turning. As we approached the scorched acre of ground, my belly tightened, jerking itself into a knot when the floor lurched under my feet. Joseph didn’t stop, but the long muscle in his jaw stood out like taut cable as he teased the throttle forward. Something crunched: the crushing of the weakened ties under the weight of the train. The earth shifted, like plates sliding; the rails, unsupported, splayed beneath the pressure of the wheels. My hands gripped the edge of the cab’s opening and the handle of the brake lever on the other side, anticipating the drop when the wheels slid off the spreading rails. My bunched knuckles seemed to be fraying through the leather gloves. If the left gave way, we’d tilt toward the mountains, and be stranded without the equipment to set the wheels back onto the tracks. If the right, the train would yield to the pull of its own weight, tumbling down the steep hillside like a string of milk cans held together by cord, and us with it if we failed to jump clear. My hands were clamped so tight I couldn’t imagine any power that would free them. I thought of some stranger months later coming upon my remains like Agent DeBeauclair’s, the bony fingers still hanging on to the crushed cab as if welded.

  Another lurch snapped my teeth together. The earth was dropping out from under us. The muscle in Joseph’s jaw twitched—he couldn’t have prevented it even if all his concentration weren’t centered on maintaining pressure on the throttle—but apart from a hissing through his nose he made no sound. Gently he eased the control forward, as if he were urging a skittish horse across a swaying bridge. This drew a noise from the boiler like a sudden intake of breath and then a shorter stroke from the drive-rods that turned the wheels, with an accelerated huh-huh-huh from the pistons: The Ghost was giving birth.

  The panting increased, we picked up speed. The broken ties were behind us.

  I let out my breath, pried loose my fingers, and flexed blood back into them. I waited for a flippant remark from Joseph. None came; this time he’d been on the same edge with me.

  We’d dodged one disaster, but the place we were in was lush with it.

  A cluster of leaves hanging like bunched grapes at the end of a branch stirred sharply, with no such movement among its neighbors to suggest a gust of wind or the draw of the train passing. A bird, possibly, taking flight from its perch, or an elk browsing for fodder. But there was an unnatural abruptness in the motion, as of something invading from outside the wilderness. A week ago I’d have thought nothing of it. I’d developed a connection with all that dense growth almost as close as the one I’d formed with the train itself. It wasn’t my first extended stay so far outside civilization, but there was something about the Sierras that was apart from all the untracked places I’d seen, as if they’d been dropped there by something flying from one world to another. If I’d been so deeply absorbed into them in so short a time, how much more difficult must it be to separate Oscar Childress from his place of exile?

  * * *

  The hot wind blew without ceasing, crackling in my ears, standing the hairs on the back of my hand at military attention, extending the nerves beneath the skin to the tips, so that the slightest change in its direction stung them like live sparks; and when it changed, it boomed like Lee’s artillery at Cold Harbor. I blinked constantly, to lubricate my eyes; but they sizzled on the instant of drawing open the lids, like side-pork frying in an iron skillet. When the Ghost turned a bend into a fresh hot gust, it was as if the desert below had stood on end and smacked me in the face with all the dead dry weight of sand and desiccated skeletons and granite ground down to powder by the hot wind. I drank from the canteen, guzzled from the goatskin bag, and full upon the orgasm of water on my throat came the sensation that it had expelled itself the way it had come, in the form of pure steam; if I dared to exhale, it would come out as smoke. I felt my intestines roasting; I could almost smell them turning into tripe.

  When I pushed my face into the slipstream outside the cab, in search of at least the illusion of cool air, I saw always in the next bend of the rails a pool of blue water. I didn’t care if mermaids swam in it, or if it was alive with leeches; it was neither hot wind nor dry sand. Men had died crawling toward that illusion. I couldn’t help but think that in the last moment before death they’d experienced something close to satisfaction.

  They’d triumphed, in their way. What did it matter whether a man withered into the earth like a fallen leaf or rotted at the bottom of a six-foot grave, one with the pine boards that had contained him? The first fed the coyotes and carrion-birds, the second worms, gray slick creatures who laid eggs to make more worms. Birds flew, at least, crossing vast territories in moments, blinking down at trains crawling beneath them at forty miles an hour; coyotes hunted and mated and cried at the moon. It shone back. All it did for me was hang in the sky, drum its fingers, and wait for dawn. We were strangers who passed on the street.

  It was the yellow fever talking. The moon was just a hole punched in the sky when you were in the pink of health.

 
Even as I bent to scoop yet another of the endless chunks of wood into the firebox—the next in line rolled into the former’s place with all the inevitability of loose dirt filling a hole—I felt the amputated hand of the man I’d slung the axe at while leaving Alamos, caressing my burning muscles, forgiving in every stroke what I’d done to him and telling me it wasn’t so bad on the other side, where all were made whole and the water ran blue and ice-cold, ideal for mixing with Judge Blackthorne’s good Scotch whisky.

  “To hell with that,” I said aloud. “He cut it straight from the Missouri before he sent it aboard. I caught a minnow in my teeth.”

  “Something?”

  Joseph, hand on the throttle as always, turned his graven-idol head thirty degrees in my direction.

  I shook myself loose of everything not connected to the cab I was riding in. It was just that, after all: a construction of wood on an iron frame, propelled by fire and water through a landscape carved from common clay.

  “Nothing. How far to civilization?”

  “Civilization? A thousand miles. Two hundred to Cabo Falso; Cabo Infierno, if you prefer. We should be there by week’s end.”

  Two hundred miles to Cape Hell. It seemed that I’d spent my entire life at that same point.

  EIGHTEEN

  Nothing changed. We might have been standing still while the trees rolled by on our left and the foothills fell behind on our right, propelled by some cranking mechanism of their own. Even the birds flying from one high branch to the next might have been jerked on invisible wires, their cries made by wooden blocks scraping against each other. The motion of the wheels and the swaying of the locomotive were the only stability I knew; if the train were to stop and I to alight from it, I’d walk with a rolling gait as if the earth itself were in motion, like a sailor cast ashore after months at sea. The Ghost was reality, solid ground the phantom. Nothing was unexpected; not even the lump of white-hot lead that sparked off the cab’s frame, so close to my face I thought a match had been struck off the tip of my nose.

  We’d slowed for a sharp curve, our bodies leaning instinctively toward the mountains, as if our combined weight would have any effect on the pressures pulling tons of iron out into space; whoever had fired the shot had been waiting for that, had probably picked the spot knowing we’d have to reduce speed to make the bend.

  Joseph was first to react. He shouted something in a language I’ll never know and hurled his upper body out the opening opposite the source of the bullet, placing as much steel between it and himself as he could within the cramped space we shared. I was more sluggish, lulled into a standing doze by the monotonous movement the way I’d slept in the saddle during long drives; but I came around after a beat, snatched up the Whitney rifle, and sent a slug flying into the dense growth. I had no target, only the desperate need to announce to whoever it was we were more than sitting fowl.

  Hell came after.

  I thought at first we’d hit a section of rough track and were rattling over a series of sharp joints. We were speeding up, trying to outrun the attack, and the chopping noise kept pace. Then a piece of the wooden post holding up the roof came apart and something stung my hand and when I looked at it blood was spreading from a ragged hole shorn through the leather. I’d been grazed by a sliver of iron from the firebox or a shard of shattered lead ricocheting off it. The broken edge of the roof looked as if it had been chewed up by a sawmill blade. A ribbon of shining chips was stitched across the stoveblack surface of the panel where the gauges were mounted; one of the thick glass lenses was starred.

  I knew then I’d lost another piece of my innocence. As often as I’d been shot at, this was the first time I’d stood in front of a Gatling gun in operation.

  I dove for the floor, snatching hold of Joseph’s sleeve and jerking him down alongside me. His face registered surprise and rage, but when he looked down at the offending hand and the dark stuff that was staining his sleeve, he nodded jerkily and rammed the throttle all the way forward. Gifted natural engineer that he was, he hadn’t let go of it. The locomotive pounced like a big cat. Hot wind boomed past my ear and the panting of the engine mixed with the chopping sound of the revolving barrels, swallowing it as the reports receded into the distance.

  “Bandits!” he shouted.

  “Bandits travel light. Would you lug heavy weaponry through the jungle with the authorities on your heels?”

  “Who, then?”

  I shook my head; but I knew the answer.

  The part that concerns me the most is the arms he’s supposed to have stockpiled: Gatlings, Napoleons, and a dozen cases of carbines. Judge Blackthorne’s words about Oscar Childress, delivered between sips of his quality whisky back in Helena.

  We charged full speed for ten more miles before we thought it safe to stop. I’d wound my bandanna around my bleeding hand, and put the throbbing out of my mind as I scouted down the tracks with the rifle to make sure whoever had set up the ambush hadn’t stationed more of the same ahead. Back in the coach, Joseph splashed on alcohol from the medical supplies, working so swiftly I was still gasping from the burn when he bound it and tied off the gauze. “There were no doctors in the village where I grew up,” he said when I admired the result. “We learned either to tend to ourselves or die from the corruption of the blood.”

  “Don’t forget the pumas.”

  “I would sooner be eaten by one than by my own rotting flesh.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  He slid the bottle of alcohol and roll of gauze into the bib of his overalls. “We must sleep in the engine, not here. And one of us must be awake at all times, to mind the gauges and to keep watch.” He was silent for a moment. “You are certain about the gun?”

  “You saw what it did to the cab.”

  “Several men with rifles could have done the same.”

  “On an open firing range. That dense growth would have deflected ordinary rifle rounds. I watched a Gatling demonstration in Fort Benton. Those fifty-caliber slugs took a piece the size of your head out of the stockade wall.”

  “How could Childress know so soon we were coming?”

  “Our friends in Alamos. If what I was told is true, there’s no wire service to his plantation. Even if lawyer Bonaparte or Chief Férreo got word to Cabo Falso, no horse and rider could make it back this far in so short an amount a time. One or the other of them must have sent a messenger directly to wherever this band was camped. Is this whole country in cahoots with Childress?”

  I tried to open a bottle of Scotch, but I couldn’t get a grip with my injured hand. He made a sound of impatience, took the bottle from me, smashed off the neck against the brake handle, and took a swig. Wiping the back of his hand across his lips, he passed it over.

  “He is not El Presidente Diaz’s only enemy. Are you still so interested to hear what this man has to say?”

  I drank, swallowed. The spirits crawled up my spine, down my arm, and into the torn heel of my hand, numbing the pain. Up ahead the Ghost conserved its strength, its iron heart pumping in measured beats like a lion at rest. “The fire behind, the plague, too, and now a blizzard of bullets. What’s a little quiet conversation compared to that?”

  He grunted and fisted the bottle. “Here, a man need not burden himself wondering what to do next. The country decides.”

  * * *

  We had another bracer apiece, then put the spirits away and got up to leave the coach. It was a relief to get to my feet without dizziness; my strength was back at last, if made a bit more buoyant by alcohol. We filled the canteen from a cask of water, pocketed some tins of food, and requisitioned extra belts of ammunition from the arsenal.

  Just before stepping down I turned back and laced my arms through the bails of two buckets of coal oil, and gestured to him to do the same. He did so without question.

  We put in another fifteen miles before sundown and pulled onto a siding in a notch that had been blasted into the mountainside to rest. Travel at night was risky, especiall
y with the threat of a tree or a boulder blocking the tracks, either by natural or human design, and Joseph said the line wasn’t exclusive to the Ghost, for all its loneliness: “The weekly express from Guadalajara is due any month.”

  Like a garment soaked with sweat in the heat of day, the jungle damp turned clammy after dark. We were warm enough in the blankets we’d brought from the coach, but the cramped quarters of the cab stiffened our muscles and we stirred often, Joseph muttering half-awake oaths in a combination of Spanish and Indian, I more often bumping against something hard and protruding, bruising my scalp, cracking that inconveniently placed knob of bone on the inside of the elbow and sending a wave of pain and nausea all the way up my arm. More than once I thought of stepping down and sleeping on the ground, but I had a horror of cockroaches, so much a part of that country the revolutionists had written them into their anthem. It was no idle fear: When my groin itched I reached down to scratch it, blaming too many days and nights spent in the same clothes, and something the size of a ground squirrel crawled onto the back of my hand. I leapt to my feet, shouting and cracking my skull on the roof of the cab, and shook the thing out into the night.

  Joseph opened one eye, the white glistening in ragged moonlight. I told him what had happened.

  “You should have waited. He was only looking for a warm place to curl up.”

  “I’m not in the business of providing shelter for vermin.”

  “You must learn to accept this country for what it is, and not wish it could be what it is not. Men have gone mad wishing.” He turned over and resumed snoring, in that steady, half-pleasant way of the native tribes.

  I inspected myself and the blanket for more intruders, gave the blanket a vigorous shake just in case, and lay back down. I didn’t know I’d fallen back asleep until I dreamed again of Lefty Dugan. He doffed his hat and bowed his head to show me the hole I’d opened there, shiny as a shotgun bore.