All the Wind in the World

by Samantha Mabry

  That morning at the breakfast—the one where the path of my life swerved hard and I became a villain—Gonzales was complaining about the mail. Would a letter from James, about Leo and the possibility of a different future, have made all the difference? I don’t think so. I never would’ve left the Real Marvelous without James.

  I swallow. “Does he know about Raoul?”

  “I told him.”

  “He never said he was leaving.”

  James shrugs. I watch his eyes travel from the shadow of hair on my head to the bee-­sting scars on my cheek and jaw to the stubborn yellowish bruise under my eye from where I hit my face on the dashboard. His eyes travel down, to the hand that still holds his wrist, and to the discoloration on my skin from welts that never healed right.

  “What happened to that finger?” I ask. “It looks like you crushed it in a door.”

  “Spider bite. At least I think so. I woke up and it was like this. I can’t think what else it would be. Hurts like crazy, though.”

  “You need to lance it.”

  “I will.”

  “What about Chicago?” I clear my throat. “I need to get back. For Lane.”

  “I think you should let that go, Sarah.”

  For a moment, we’re together, close but not close. I figure it’s the last time I’ll ever get to touch him, so I give it another shot: “I’ll go, but only if you come with me.”

  James shakes his head and gently pulls his hand away. “You can still make it if you run,” he says. “Just go, Sarah.”

  Bruno said go. James says go.

  I stay.

  THAT NIGHT I can’t keep thoughts about my life—not my house in the hill or in the desert, but my real life—out of my head. It starts with the farm and my grandmother telling me how desperate people were when she was a little girl. They’d come down from Chicago, most of them on foot, begging for food or a place to stay. She was young then, but she remembered her grandfather sitting on the porch all hours of the day with his shotgun across his knees, telling these tired and hungry people to move on.

  “I didn’t understand then,” she told me. “I thought he was just being cruel. I learned later that desperate people turn, like an apple gone to rot from the inside out. Most of them can’t be trusted. The ones that can be trusted will most likely figure things out on their own.”

  I remember my grandmother teaching Lane and me how to take care of ourselves and each other. We learned to bake bread from yeast we caught in the windowsill and set traps and tend to the livestock, but most of all we learned how to work hard without complaining.

  I remember one time when I was ten and got cocky when I was learning to ride. A horse bucked me, and I fell and dislocated my right shoulder. I was either too afraid or too proud to tell my grandmother, so I just sat in that field until nightfall. When she found me, she shoved a hunk of leather in my mouth, told me to bite down, and jammed my shoulder back into place. It healed, but it never healed right.

  There was the time when Lane and I were out gathering berries, and I looked up to see a child I didn’t know trying to talk Lane into coming with her to play in the road. The next thing I know, my grandmother comes tearing from the house with her shotgun and aims those two barrels straight at that child’s forehead. Lane started crying, and I nearly did, too. My grandmother told us to get in the house. I never did hear a shot.

  My mother. She played the violin and taught me enough about music so that I could teach myself the rest. What I remember most about her was that she had blond hair the color of Lane’s and that she gazed out the front windows of the farmhouse and cried a lot. I don’t even really remember her face because it was always angled toward that window. Then one day she was just gone. She left in the night without saying good-­bye to any of us. I’ve never missed her, and throughout my life never wished she was around to comfort me when times got tough. She needed to comfort herself most of all—that’s what she needed. Maybe that finally happened. I don’t know.

  My most crystal memories are from that farmhouse. My memories from Chicago come in small snatches. There was the feel of my sister’s hand when we were marched into the boardinghouse. It was small and cold, her skin shriveled like a piece of paper that had been wadded into a ball and then smoothed back out. The springs on my bunk at the boardinghouse were so old and tired they made a noise if I exhaled too loudly. On the wall next to my pillow were scratches made by the fingernails of the girl who bunked there before me, who learned her ABCs but never quite got to proper reading and writing. There were just random letters strung together. Sometimes there was a word, like were or salt, but I think those were accidents.

  We were not beaten at the boardinghouse. We were not underfed, and no one was particularly cruel to us, except for those times when the housemother would catch Lane trying to kiss the other girls. Then the nuns would beat Lane’s butt with a paddle in front of everyone. Lane would stare me down, silently begging me to save her, but I never did. Later I told her that if she was that determined, she needed to learn how to get better at sneaking around.

  The reason we left the boardinghouse was simple: Lane and I were used to a certain kind of freedom and were determined to have it again. And we did, at least for a little while.

  We had a room in a walk-­up by the water. It was the room that Lane died in. Our downstairs neighbors ate a lot of cabbage, and our room constantly stank of it. My sister and I would climb the fire escape to watch sunsets on the roof. The air wasn’t exactly what you would call fresh, but at least it didn’t smell like cabbage. There were no stars to see in Chicago, but we remembered the constellations we learned at the farm—Virgo, the Dippers—and would point to the sky as if those constellations were still there. We’d make up new ones and give them names like the Butcher of South America and the Mighty Kitten. We’d even sit up there in the dead of winter. We’d screech and hunch together, refusing to be defeated by the cold wind. I remember Lane’s arms: tiny, flimsy things.

  On one of the tables in the diner where I first met James, there was a brown ring left by a coffee cup. It never came clean no matter how hard I scrubbed it.

  I don’t remember the first time James kissed me, but I do remember the second. We’d spent too much money to see a movie that wasn’t any good. We were walking home when he pulled me into an alley and pressed me gently against the side of a brick building. There wasn’t any privacy—people were every­where, trains always tore through—but James had the ability to make the big world seem small. He brushed my hair away from my face. I hooked my pointer finger into his belt loop and tugged. We fit so perfectly together.

  I remember Lane’s dead body and how, after a couple of days, her jaw started hinging open to reveal a tongue turned green-­gray. It was time then, when she started to look like she was silently moaning, to let her go—even though I fought against it.

  There is so much wind in the world. I learned that on the trains. The wind made me happy again. That and space and James’ good nature. We’d jump trains when we needed money. Even in our most desperate times, James would say or do something that would make me laugh, like when he ordered blueberry pie or came up with the most daring plans.

  I’d forgotten about that, all the laughing.

  I haven’t had the worst life.

  TWENTY-SeVEN

  On the day I die, I get to take a shower.

  But before I’m escorted to the bathhouse, I take my bandanna out from the waist of my jeans and stuff it and its contents in the envelope James gave me. I give that envelope to Ortiz and ask him to hide it in the stables until he can find a way to send it to Leo Sanchez in Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico. I ask him to send it anonymously, but Leo will figure out who it’s from if he remembers my bandanna.

  It’s a present forged from guilt, but it’s a present all the same. I looked to Leo and saw an enemy. I did that out of habit. If Bell was right, he was trying to be my friend, but it had been so long since somebody tried to be my friend, I couldn�
��t put the pieces together.

  “Can I trust you to send it?” I ask Ortiz.

  He thinks a moment before he replies. “I’ll send it. I promise. It’s bad luck to lie to a person who’s about to die.”

  THE WATER IN the shower isn’t very warm, but I stay in for a long time anyway. I scrub my skin with coal soap until it’s pink. I pick out the dirt from underneath my fingernails and try not to notice the short lifeline on my palm. My feet, though, they’re beyond saving. They could belong to a mummy. A horse once stamped on one of my pinkie toes, and ever since then the nail refused to grow. Both my big toes are cocked inward, and the nails are yellow and thick.

  When I emerge scrubbed clean, the sun is still high in the sky. The air smells strange, different from the usual scent of human and animal filth. It’s acrid, sweet, and smoky. Like diesel, but not quite. I realize it must be all the burned and burning maguey, all those plants that couldn’t be harvested, all that money wasted.

  The jimadors are gathered around the center of camp, which means that work was cut short today so that I could have an audience. The overseer binds my hands behind my back, grabs me by the upper arm, and marches me through the crowd. His mastiff shuffles and grunts along beside him. The jimadors are quiet, but the kids are babbling at one another or squatting and drawing circles in the dirt with their fingers.

  I scan the crowd for familiar faces: Eva, Odette (who never did come back to visit me like she said she would), Ortiz, even the ghost of Bruno, who either had a lovely heart that was destroyed by the desert or a brutal nature that the desert revealed. I will miss them, all of them. But it’s too bright for me to see at a distance. I wasn’t allowed to wear my sun hat.

  A ten-­foot wood pole stands, upright, a few yards beyond where the campfire has just been started in preparation for supper. I have a vision of myself, tied up and shrieking, as I’m burned at the stake. It will be slow and painful, and I’ll have to watch everyone watching me die.

  This scares the living shit out of me.

  But then I see Gonzales, standing off to the right, holding a double-­barrel shotgun down by his side. James is there, too. He’s next to Farrah. Her copper hair is flying westward. James has a fresh set of clothes on. His hair is combed back. I’d like to think he got clean just for me. As I pass him, I see he’s wearing his old boots again, the ones he’s had forever, the ones that have taken him across rivers and state lines. He has on mirrored sunglasses, so I can’t see his eyes. Bell is not there, thank God.

  I’m made to stand against the pole and face the jimadors while Gonzales steps forward to tell the crowd why they’re all gathered.

  “This girl is a liar and a criminal,” he says, which is undeniably true. “She put herself into my good graces only to abandon my youngest daughter to the elements and leave her for dead.”

  Gonzales pauses, as if waiting for a response from the crowd. Nothing comes.

  He goes on to tell them that I will be put to death here as a reminder that the Real Marvelous does not tolerate insub­ordination or harbor criminals, and that no traitorous deed will go unpunished. The crowd, to their credit, remains silent. Over their heads, the mountains in the distance are coffee-­colored and dotted with dark green.

  Apparently, I’ll get no opportunity to plead my case or give any last words, which is fine. I deserve this fate: for Bell, for Angus. The overseer works to fasten my blindfold, and I’m sad that the last thing I’ll smell is some sweat-­soaked rag. The last thing I’ll see, as the overseer makes adjustments to the blindfold, is a nearby jimador flinch and slap his arm.

  For a moment, I hear nothing of note, only the sound of someone coughing and my own breath as I’m trying my best to smooth it out. Why I still find the need to impress these people with my stoicism, I have no idea. James has always said that I was strong. I should be proving him wrong. I should be gasping for air, pissing myself, visibly shaking with fear, and shrieking a newfound allegiance to the gods above.

  I’m no saint. I shouldn’t be trying to act like one.

  Gonzales’ boots crunch against the dirt, but at the same time I hear something else. It’s a hum that comes from the east, a hum that starts off in dissonant strains but then melds together like an orchestra tuning. The jimadors start to chatter. There’s the sound of wind, arriving in a great, sudden gust.

  Someone screams, and I’m sprayed with dust. A rifle goes off, and my legs give out. I stumble back against the pole, and the back of my head knocks against the wood. My ears ring. It takes me a second to realize I’m not dead. I heard the shot, which means I’m not dead. I’m hit again with blowing rocks and dust. But when the rocks cling and start to probe my skin, I realize they’re not rocks. They’re bees. They’re crawling on my arms and my face, in my hair. The mastiff—I can hear it bark and then yelp, the pitch so high it hurts my ears.

  I fall to my knees, collapse to my side, and attempt to writhe against the ground to push off my blindfold. Pain shoots up my spine in two places. I scream, my teeth scraping against the dirt.

  I’m thinking that I’ll die here pathetically, blind and tied, when I’m hauled up to unsteady feet. My blindfold is stripped off, and I blink. The sunlight is patchy, streaming weakly through hovering black clouds of bees. I’m stung on the neck and the wrist and try to twist away from the pain.

  “Hold still!” I hear Gonzales shout.

  He slams me back against the post, steps away, and loads two fresh shells into the rifle. A bee skips across his eyebrow. I might have died there, on the ground from stings, but Gonzales wants my death for himself. It doesn’t even seem to matter that the Real Marvelous is in the process of coming undone around him.

  He takes aim. My eyes are open, staring into twin black barrels, so close I can smell the powder burn from the last shot. Gonzales cocks the hammer back. My stomach clenches with the click.

  Something zips into my field of vision from the side, skimming just past the tip of my nose. I think for a second that it’s a bee, but it can’t be. It’s too big. There’s a flash, clean and bright, followed by a crack so loud I scream. I feel a sizzle against my cheek and again, thinking I’m shot, I lose the strength in my legs.

  Someone catches me. The tension on my bound hands increases for a second, then releases. I’m free, and someone has hold of one of my wrists. It’s James. In his other hand is Gonzales’ rifle. He flips it around and plows the butt end into Gonzales’ forehead. The owner crumples to the ground. James then crouches down, snatches his bone-­handled knife from the dirt, and slides it back into his boot.

  James threw his knife: to hit the gun, to hit Gonzales. I don’t have time to ask what he’s done or why he’s done it because he’s pulling me away from the center of camp and toward the diesel trucks, which are all parked in a row at the far edge of camp.

  James’ sunglasses are gone, and a couple of bees are on his face, tiptoeing over the sweat near his brow and the bridge of his nose. Another dances across his collar. He doesn’t even try to swat them away.

  I run, but I’m breathless and can’t get into a stride. My skin is on fire. I’m stumbling, seeing double.

  Behind me, from the center of camp, a too-­familiar voice cries out and brings me to a halt.

  “Burn them!”

  I yank my arm from James’ grip and spin around. There’s Eva, running barefoot past the campfire, holding a makeshift bramble torch above her head. The flame appears to ripple slowly, like a bright orange flag catching the slightest breeze. This is her time—to bring forth the destruction of everything she believes is meant to destroy us. It’s the rebirth she’s been talking about. Fire is the ultimate cleanser. Fire will scorch the earth, and new, pure things will emerge from it.

  Her eyes are wide, lit with satisfaction. Like the bees have come at her request and fire burns because she asks it to. Like she is the witch she’s been warning about. The jimadors are hers to control—this she believes. If she lives through this day, what a tale Eva will have to tell of
her triumph.

  “Burn it all down!” she shouts.

  And they do. The jimadors snatch up logs from the fire and swipe them through the air to fend off the bees. But their aim isn’t true. They’re spinning in circles, setting other people’s—or their own—clothes on fire, setting the bunkhouse walls on fire.

  Others run up the hill toward the ranch house. Foremen on horseback attempt to cut them off. They’re smashing jimadors’ faces with rifle butts. Some are fast and are getting through, though. I could get through, I bet. A part of me wishes I were with them, rushing to that house, screaming at the top of my lungs. There are things I want in there: eggshells, a violin, Bell.

  Bell. Where is Bell? Where is Farrah, and why is she not with James?

  A new wave of jimadors advance toward the house. These have coas in their hands. The supply shed’s been raided. There are bodies on the ground around it, bodies that are twitching and oozing blood that quickly turns black in the heat. The foremen guarding the ranch house flip their guns and start firing. Inside the house, glass breaks; a window explodes. Soon, the house will burn, too.

  I watch as Bell and Farrah emerge from around the back. In the chaos, Farrah went to the house for her sister. That’s what I would have done, too: found Lane first. Farrah’s tugging Bell along behind her, urging her short legs to pump faster. The sisters are skirting the far edge of camp, in the direction of the stables, where the horses are and where all my money is stuffed in an envelope.

  My money.

  I sprint away from James and hear him behind me, shouting. He’s trying to grab me, pull me back.

  “We need to leave!” His desperate fingers brushing against mine. “Sarah, no!”

  Up ahead, windows are shattering from inside the house and the back edge of the building has started to smoke. Still, I keep running because without the money, where will I go? James was right about that. I’ll go to another maguey field and work for next to nothing. I can drive one of the trucks until the tank runs out of gas, but that could be a matter of hours. Maybe less. Then what? I walk? Not likely. Not for long.