Cape Hell

by Loren D. Estleman

  I should of left you to drown in that river, Page.

  He wasn’t speaking so much as willing the words into my head, where they dropped and lay like dead ash from spent kindling.

  My eyes popped open. I’d have slept easier with the roach. I slid out from under the blanket and stepped down, carrying the Whitney rifle. I’d traded the ticking-cap for my hat; the sweatband felt like snail-slime against my forehead. I walked alongside the tracks, paying no attention to things that crunched under my boots. On a cloudless night in the mountains, the stars were as big as Christmas balls, the quarter-moon hanging so close to the earth I could grab its bottom horn with both hands and pull myself up to my chin.

  The hours of darkness belonged to the lesser creatures. The din of crickets and tree-frogs was as loud as the Barbary Coast at midnight, with the empty-barrel gulp of the odd bullfrog coming in at intervals so irregular they were impossible to predict; it had waked me every time. In the distance—it might have been my imagination, caused by all our talk—the cry of a hunting cat shredded the heavy overlay of sound like someone tearing canvas.

  I don’t know how much time I spent walking, but when I stopped and turned back, the train was almost out of sight, its black prow visible only as the silver-blue steam drifted through the slots in the cowcatcher like a phantom passing through solid matter. I trudged back, hoisted myself up by the grab-rail, and wound myself back into the blanket, clutching the rifle as if it would stand off nightmares the way it did men and beasts. The rest of the night was as long as what had come before, and although I slept no more I was glad when first light came. I assumed men who were condemned to hang at dawn welcomed the end of that last night just as much.

  NINETEEN

  “Jesus Dio!” Joseph hauled back on the brake.

  The wheels screamed, showering sparks in fantails on both sides of the cab; one of them landed square on the back of the hand that was still healing. It stung like a wasp, but I hardly noticed it. I was too busy flying backward.

  I was an India-rubber ball attached to an elastic band. I slammed against the stacked wood in the tender, the impact slapping my lungs flat. Then the band contracted, pitching me forward; but I was ready for that. I threw my hands against the cast-iron panel with its goggle-eyed gauges, catching myself before my head could go into the open firebox. There I leaned, pumping air back into my chest. I was a broken bellows sucking up shards of glass.

  The rest of my senses blinked back on like bubbles popping in thick soup. My vision cleared, the engine wheezed rhythmically, I smelled the sharp odor of steel on steel, identified the sour-iron aftertaste of fear on my tongue. My ears ached from the shrieking of the wheels.

  Every curse my father had taught me came to mind, along with some refinements I’d picked up in battle and on the cattle trail, but I choked them back. I respected Joseph’s mastery of his machine. Most times he operated it as if the brakes didn’t exist. All I could see was his hunched back, seemingly decapitated; he’d stuck his head that far through the opening on the left, straining to peer up the tracks. The muscles on the hand gripping the brake handle were bunched tight, stretching the glove taut.

  I peeled my palms away from the front of the cab. The wound was throbbing now, aggravated by the live spark that had burned a hole through the bandage. “Did we hit something?”

  No reply. He pried loose his grasp. The handle looked crimped, as if by a pair of powerful pliers. I couldn’t remember if it had been that way before, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d done it with his fist alone. He blew out a bellyful of pent-up air and hopped down from the cab.

  I followed. I thought of the rifle only when I was on the ground. I didn’t go back for it. Something about the episode told me it wouldn’t be useful.

  It wasn’t. A great dark heap lay across the tracks, not ten feet from where the locomotive had come to rest. I thought at first part of the mountain had fallen away, and felt the full force of the collision we’d narrowly missed.

  Then the wind kicked up, clearing away the steam from the pipes and the smoke from the wheels, and I saw it was no rockslide, although the result wouldn’t have been different if we had hit it. Coarse black hair stirred in the current of air, the tips glinting, as if they’d been dipped in silver by a smith. A slagheap of muscle beneath. I caught another smell then, of rank sweat and suet and something more visceral, thick and pungent, like musty wine gushing from a shattered barrel; the last expulsion of life, spilling out like—

  “Guts.” Joseph pointed to a glistening red pile a few feet away from the mound, still steaming even in that torpid climate; the last combative gasp of a life lived on its own terms.

  I walked around to the front of the thing, which was pointed in the direction of the mountains, the blunt muzzle with its shotgun-bore nostrils raised slightly; inexorably, the brute had been heading for high ground, nose into the wind. The ears were tiny in comparison to the oven-size head, the open eyes like black shoe-buttons; but the corrugated lips were curled back to expose fangs the length and thickness of a man’s thumb, defiant even in death. Extinct, the American Grizzly still boiled with savage hate. The remnants of its breath stank of raw fish and fermented juniper berries. I thought of sardines preserved in gin.

  Joseph took its left rear paw with its calliope of razor-sharp black claws and lifted it with both hands. The old fellow still had his lungs; they hadn’t got them. A gust passed through the reeds of its throat: more rank air, accompanied by a roar, or rather the ghost of one; a sickly thing, almost a bleat, with only the memory of power behind it, but it was enough to shrink my spine. I sprang back; impossible not to, even knowing the source. I’d heard too many stories of hunters slain by a beast they thought was killed.

  “He is warm still,” the Indian said. “I should say he has not been dead an hour. But he came here with more inside him.” His arm swept across the pile of guts; it was too small to account for the size of the cavity. “He was killed and gutted, but to what purpose? The meat remains.”

  “One of your pumas, interrupted by the train.”

  “I have never known one to attack a grizzly, let alone win. Also the cat eats from the outside in, starting with the neck and shoulders, then the buttocks. They have not been touched. Always he saves the insides for dessert.” He groped the thick mantle of matted fur encircling the massive neck, stopped, probed, then held up a forefinger, stained purple to the second knuckle. “Gunshot wound. Man is the only animal who slays for anything other than food.”

  “There’s only one reason anyone would shoot down a bear on railroad tracks and not take the skin or meat.”

  Immediately he straightened and joined me in scanning the forest. Birds perched and nested undisturbed among the branches.

  “It is not a good place for an ambush,” he said. “The undergrowth is too thick, and a man in a tree presents too good a target. One cannot choose where a bear will decide to cross the rails.”

  “But why take away the guts?”

  “Quien sabe? The other thing about man is one can seldom judge his actions until it is too late.”

  The Indian was getting to be tiresome company. He seemed never to grow weary about being right.

  * * *

  Neither of us was foolish enough to attempt to remove eight hundred lifeless pounds from the tracks without a brace of oxen, but after contemplating the immense mound of hair and flesh and gristle and bone I went back to the locomotive and brought two buckets of coal oil. Joseph, catching the significance, did the same, and we spent ten minutes splashing the contents over the carcass, soaking it to the skin; by the time we finished, our eyes were watering from the fumes. He backed up the train another fifty yards for safety’s sake while I wrapped a rag around a branch I broke off a tree and saturated it with what was left in the last bucket. I stepped back and touched a match to the rag. It went up with a sucking sound. I cocked my arm and flung the torch at the bear.

  Blue flame traced a narrow path through t
hick hair toward the hump behind the grizzly’s neck, and then the rest of the heap caught with a thud that shook the ground. By then I’d retreated almost as far as the train, but I felt the heat all down my front. The flames leapt sixty feet into the air, gushing black smoke that would continue to stain the blank sky long hours after we’d pulled away. My nostrils shrank from the stench of scorched hair, fumes, and roasting meat.

  The long coarse guard hairs, designed to shed water, went first, flaring yellow and peeling away from the tan downy undergrowth, like yellowed cotton batting, that kept the animal warm when the mercury fell below zero. Next came the flesh, such a bright pink that many hunters would rather take the hide from a skunk than a bear; the naked carcass looked too much like a freshly skinned human being. I turned away at that point.

  We lay over for the night while the obstruction smoldered, taking turns carrying the red safety lantern to flag down any other trains that might approach from behind; it was obvious none would be coming from the other direction, with the fire making a beacon visible for miles.

  I fed and watered the bay and walked it along the track away from the burning hulk and its sinister stench. The horse placed its hooves carefully; days aboard a moving train had robbed it of its faith in stationary surfaces. I gave it a sympathetic pat, but just one. That breed of creature and I understood each other too well to expect any greater sign of affection.

  The fire was still burning at dawn, but by the time the sun cleared the mountains the bear was a pile of charred bones, stubborn clumps of smoking fur, and simmering puddles of grease. If anything it looked more fearsome in that state, like something prehistoric from a time when the earth was no safe place for man. The hooped rib cage, big as it was—a full-size man could have crawled through it on hands and knees without brushing the sides—brought me back to the abandoned dugout where we’d spent a night, and the bones of the murdered Pinkerton detective, like hollow wooden flutes. He’d made a study of Oscar Childress and wound up a skeleton; the grizzly had attracted his attention or that of someone like him, and ended the same way. I’d been sent to kill him. What was to prevent me from leaving my own bones behind in Mexico?

  “Nothing,” Joseph said.

  I jumped; no matter how civilized an Indian, he always managed to come up on a white man noiselessly. “What?”

  “There is nothing here that two men cannot now remove; although I wish I’d thought of sparing the heart before we set fire to it. My people say that to eat the heart of a bear is to inherit some of its strength and courage. Why do you laugh?” he asked then.

  I stopped. The sound was strange in my own ears. I hadn’t heard it since before I’d crossed the border.

  “I wish I’d known that before I ate my first chicken liver.”

  He snorted and tugged on his gloves. No matter how uncivilized a white man, no Indian will ever share his humor.

  We wrapped our bandannas around our faces and cleared away what we could of the debris, breaking often when our gloves started to smolder. At last we took hold of the great leering skull and twisted it this way and that, again and again. The half-incinerated tendons fought us with all the determination of the beast in life, and when finally the skull tore loose with a pop, the sudden release nearly threw us to the ground. We hurled it down the slope. It turned end over end, slow as a ballet, its jaws opening in one last silent roar. When it landed at the base of the foothills, it threw up a geyser of dust and ash. We crossed ourselves in unison.

  “What about the ties?” Panting, I stared at the still-glowing timbers supporting the rails.

  “The Ghost laughs at such things, as we well know.”

  It didn’t; but after a few teeth-clenching moments of wild rocking, the train settled onto the level. Joseph eased the throttle forward and we thundered deeper into the green empty space on the map of the Conquistadors.

  III

  Cape Hell

  TWENTY

  We hadn’t gone a mile when the sun went out, like a sharp draft blowing out a candle. The sky turned black and the dam broke, simple as that.

  We crept through ten miles of rainfall so heavy we might have been rolling along the bottom of the ocean. At noon, the time when under normal circumstances the Mexican sun scoured everything as bright as brass, our headlamp was good for no more than five yards, with the water lancing down through its shaft like silver spikes. The rain was as thick as molasses and nearly as black; Joseph had me light a lantern in order to see the gauges. The air in the cab was so heavy we were breathing each other’s exhaust. We took turns leaning out the sides looking for the oncoming lamp of another train or more obstacles on the track, and pulled our heads back in, blinded by water and soaked halfway to the waist; but it was worth it to escape the fug inside.

  “The gods have taken a dislike to us,” Joseph said, squeezing a puddle onto the floor from his bandanna. “The monsoons are not due for another month.”

  “The gods?” I stressed the plural. Scratch the newly converted and you found a heathen every time.

  “Jesus, He is not so vengativo; what is the word in English?”

  “Vengeful.”

  “They are weak, the old ones, and so they huddle together in the rain, where the priests cannot ferret them out.”

  I couldn’t argue with his science; but I could inject some of my own. “The same rain is falling on Childress, don’t forget.”

  “We shall see. The seasons are not so sensato up here as below.”

  I saw what he meant an hour later, when we emerged from the deluge as suddenly as if we’d slid through a curtain. Ahead, the sun flashed off the rails and made cracks in the earth on either side of the cinderbed; behind us was a black wall of water. Oven air filled the cab, as stultifying as when we’d been hemmed in by rain.

  He leaned forward on the throttle and motioned toward the firebox. I’d just fed it; flames leapt out when I opened the door, heating the space beyond bearing. I looked at him, panting like a parched dog.

  “There is a two-mile grade ahead,” he said. “Without enough steam we will have to back down to the level and start again.”

  I poked as many chunks into the box as would fit, the flames licking at my gloves and drawing steam from where I’d stained the left with blood. We swung around a bend—going fast enough, I swore, to lift the landward wheels clear of the track—and began the steady climb; the pistons pumped their elbows, planted their feet, and leaned into the grade. A third of the way up we slowed, slowed some more; the wheels made a noise new to me, a wet sliding sound like a catfish makes when it misgauges a leap, lands on the deck of a boat, and slides across the boards. Just then we stopped moving at all, although I could still hear the wheels turning; in place, with a shrill complaining whine and the drive rods churning—grunting, like an old man grappling with a steep flight of stairs. The cords stood out in Joseph’s neck; he had the throttle all the way forward and was still pushing. He wouldn’t have shown more strain if he’d loaded the train onto his back and started carrying it himself.

  “Grease on the rails,” he said through clamped teeth.

  I smelled it then, through the wood-smoke and hot oil and steam rolling off scorched metal: a rank stench, as if something had crawled up into the cab and died days before.

  The Indian smelled it too. He had both fists on the throttle then, but freed one to touch the four points of his throat, shoulders, and abdomen.

  I knew then what he knew: why the grizzly was dead, and what had happened to the rest of its entrails.

  They hadn’t gotten there on their own. Whoever had gutted the beast had carried them all that way and spread them on the rails where the grade began, to stop the Ghost literally in its tracks. My stomach did a slow turn. I forced back bitter bile; and I was ten feet from the source of the reek. I saw in a flash the wretches charged with the task, faces bound and breathing through their mouths.

  There came an evil outhouse fetor of boiling offal as the slime reacted to the heat of friction.
The wheels spun, but we were stock still.

  The trees along this stretch were of much more recent growth than what we’d passed; sometime within the past couple of decades, a fire had cleared several acres, leaving only black earth behind; striplings had sprouted, growing into adolescent trunks spaced far enough apart for a man to squeeze between them on horseback. From the greased grade to the open terrain, the area might have been designed by the patron saint of bushwhackers.

  I thrust out a hand and closed it on the engineer’s where it gripped the throttle. “Put it in reverse.”

  He acted without question, hauling the handle back toward his body. The wheels screamed with the sound of metal shearing, the Ghost shuddered, violently enough to make me lunge for a handhold; it seemed as if the boiler was about to blow. Then the shaking stopped, steam sighed, and the trees began moving forward. We were backing down the tracks, still slipping a little but moving, if far too slow for comfort.

  Then the pounding started again, slugs the size of lumps of coal punching holes in the cab’s wooden frame, spanging off steel and iron and kicking up sparks. The bear’s carcass had delayed us long enough for the men who’d dropped it there to ride to the spot, measure the range, and set up a nest. This was no catch-as-catch-can operation like the last attack; I ducked just as a shrieking ball of lead passed through the space where my head had been. Thank God I’m not tall.

  We were picking up speed. Trains don’t go as fast backwards as forward, but gravity was helping out. Joseph left the brake alone. We were doing thirty at least when we hit the level, and when we made it back around the bend he let the throttle out all the way. By then we’d picked up fire from another angle, not as regular as from the Gatling, but from more than a few rifles placed in strategic position. I could picture the snipers arranged in two rows, kneeling in front, standing in the rear, firing in volleys. We crouched below the opening in the cab, I clutching the Whitney across my thighs. It was no good as long as I couldn’t risk showing myself long enough to locate a target and take aim from a moving platform, but the solid stock felt good in my hands.