Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

  Rollins didn’t give the boys time to answer. “You must’ve lost the little bit of sense you was born with. One of them boys is as useless as a lame horse, other one’d probably put the bullet in you himself.”

  “Rightly so,” Marshall said. “Wouldn’t blame him if he did. But I don’t think the Archangel’s that type of nigger. I think he’s more the faithful dog type.” He turned and scrutinized Gabriel for a long moment, then rose with the energy of sudden inspiration. “I’ll prove it, too,” he said. He strode over to his saddlebags, rummaged around while the others waited in silence, and finally came back into the light of the fire. Upheld for all to see was a tiny nickel-plated gun, barely large enough to fill his palm. “This here belonged to the old heifer herself. Some say it’s a whore’s weapon, but I figure a derringer will kill a man as quick as anything else. Here you go, boy, arm yourself.” He tossed the gun toward Gabriel, who snatched it out of the air with a defensive motion, then set it down just as quickly on the sand before him. “Keep it,” Marshall said. “Just remember not to shoot your load too soon. Hear? Wait till you see the whites of their eyes.”

  This set Dallas to laughing. He clapped his hands as if somebody had suddenly struck up a tune, repeating “the whites of their eyes, whites of their eyes” as if the phrase were a song in itself. Rollins was none too sure about it. He began to caution Marshall, but then he gave up in disgust and stalked away.

  Gabriel felt someone’s eyes on him. He looked up into the frank stare of the Mexican girl. It was the first time she’d looked directly at him, and it made his heart beat faster. There was an openness in those sad, beautiful eyes that he’d never glimpsed, as if they were two small portals into a world as yet unimagined. He saw that there was also a question, a whole host of questions, etched in the lines that creased her forehead. And further, as his eyes began to water from an unblinking stare, he read a challenge written in her tight lips. Then she lay down on her side, eyes blank once more.

  Before long Marshall moved away from the fire. He settled himself against the wall of the cave and whispered a song just under his breath. He sang just softly enough that Gabriel couldn’t hear the words, and just loudly enough that he couldn’t escape them. Gabriel looked down at the pistol before him, a tiny thing, inanimate although lit by moving firelight. He could still feel it in his hand, the coolness, the weight, the corrugated roughness of its handle. He didn’t pick it up, but neither did he move away from it.

  The boy pushed a half-burned log further into the fire, slowly regaining his calm, easing his heart. His eyes fell on Dunlop, who lay on the other side of the fire, on his side, hands still tied behind his back. His head rested at an odd angle, as if he were relaxed in an awkward sleep, but his eyes met Gabriel’s as if they’d been waiting. He mouthed a word.

  Gabriel craned forward, feeling the heat of the fire on his chin. The man repeated the word and added a few more. Gabriel shook his head. His eyes darted over to Marshall, but he was turned the other way. “What?” Gabriel whispered, but Dunlop still didn’t speak aloud. He watched the boy with a face of complete sorrow. It was sadder, Gabriel thought, than the face of a dying man. Dunlop nodded, as if he heard the boy’s thoughts. He turned away from the fire and curled into himself and spoke no more.

  As Gabriel stretched out to sleep, he slid his hand over the derringer. He didn’t pick it up, but he cupped it within his palm, between his flesh and the sand, and slept holding it in partnership with the earth.

  THE SCOT LED HIS HORSE AWAY in the quiet, dead hours of deep night. He held the reins twined tight in the fingers of his bound hands, taking small steps and placing his feet lightly on the earth. He asked the horse for silence, but the creature seemed to know already that this was called for. It made no noise but looked with round, anxious eyes back toward the sleeping men.

  Thirty minutes later, the man found a ridge of rock about waist high. He led the horse beside it and asked it to stand still. He scrambled up unto the shelf. A second later, he was astride the horse. He gripped it with his knees and urged it forward. He did his best to head to the east, galloping across the flats and letting the horse pick its way through the chaparral groves. He spoke to his horse, asking it to help him have strength, telling it that he had feared for so long his head was clouded with the stuff and he couldn’t think straight. He asked it to help him think, to give him speed, and he promised it that this was not flight. That it could not be flight, because he had too many cords binding him to others, too many things incomplete.

  He rode on through the dawn, hatless, his brown hair flapping with the breeze against him, up and down with the motion of the horse. His face was red in the sun’s light, stern, coppered by it as if he were made of that metal. Never before had the world looked so bleak to him, so crimson and aflame and pockmarked and lonely, so much like hell. He thought of things he hadn’t thought of in a long time, of family dead and buried, of days spent in another land, and of times when the burdens on his soul had been but the yearnings of a child. Those times seemed filled with sadness, and he wondered why he hadn’t realized it then.

  He clucked to his horse and urged it to greater speed.

  GABRIEL AWOKE TO A COMMOTION IN CAMP. Rollins was cursing and Dallas was looking around with sleepy eyes and Marshall was laughing. “That cheeky bastard,” he said. “Everybody up. We got us a runaway.”

  The men sought out Dunlop’s tracks from where his horse had been staked and saw that he had led it away on foot, only mounting up about a mile away, with the help of a shelf of rock. It was obvious that he was still hand-tied. But it didn’t matter. He was away.

  Marshall seemed more amused than angered by the whole thing. Dallas wanted to ride out immediately, but Marshall said it could wait a bit. Rollins said he didn’t give two shits what happened to Dunlop anymore. He figured he’d end up dead anyway, a hand-tied idjit out in the wilderness, maybe heading straight for a posse that was out to kill him. “To my mind, he’s as dead as if I shot him myself,” Rollins said.

  Marshall heard him out but seemed less sure of Dunlop’s demise. He said he’d hired the Scot himself, and he didn’t hire fools. “But still. Some things can’t be helped. Dallas, that idea of yours about Hawaii’s sounding better by the minute.”

  It had taken James the entire length of the conversation to process the most fundamental aspect of the news. “He’s gone?” He spoke through cracked lips, looking from one person to the next as if seeing them for the first time, checking each one to confirm what he’d thought he heard. “He’s gone?” His eyes settled on Gabriel. “Gabe, he gone and left us? He didn’t do that. Did he? He . . . He . . .” The boy struggled to his feet, a wide-eyed and crazed intensity suddenly taking him over. “He’s leaving us to die?”

  Rollins strode over to him, saying, “Shut your mouth, boy. We got things to think about.” With one movement he kicked James’s legs from under him, sending him sprawling. He turned and resumed his conversation.

  James was up in a second. Faster than Gabriel had ever seen him move, he ran toward the man’s receding back, jumped, and landed with his hands like claws in Rollins’s neck. He tore at the man’s flesh with his fingers, dug his heels into his sides, and pounded him with the full force of his body.

  But only for a few seconds. Rollins spun with the boy on his back, grabbed him with one hand across his collar, and threw him to the ground with a force that completely knocked the air out of him. He lashed into the boy’s face with his boot, kicking like a man possessed as James writhed in a cloud of dust.

  Gabriel rose to his feet unsteadily, for the first time able to grasp the possibility of his own death. It grew as suddenly within him as James’s anger had. If he had to watch this in order to live, life was not something he wanted anymore. Let him die and let this end. So he thought, and with this thought he asked his legs to carry him forward. But something happened before he’d even taken a step.

  He didn’t see the girl move, but somehow she slipped like m
ercury into the whirlwind of violence. She placed herself between the man and the boy and looked up at Rollins with a defiance that gave the man pause. She yelled something at him in Spanish. Rollins backed away, but only long enough to draw. His gun appeared in his hand as if it had always been there, and he aimed it pointblank at the boy’s head and told the girl to get the hell out of the way or she’d die on the spot. Only then did Marshall caution him to stop.

  “Why can’t I kill him? Kill them both, for fuck’s sake. Marshall, he done scratched my neck. Not to mention that he’s a damn fool nigger that never should’ve been with us in the first place and will probably get us killed.”

  “One could say the same about you—the damn fool part, I mean,” Marshall replied. “Leave him for now, Rollins. Just do it, cause I said so. You already kicked the tar out of him, and it’s your fault the girl’s here in the first place.”

  “And I wish we had never brought her. She ain’t even a decent fuck no more. She just lies there hating ya, looking away like yer not even doing it to her. Goddamn, she makes ya feel . . .”

  “Dickless? Makes you feel like you ain’t even got a pecker and are no more a man than one of them Chihuahua rats is a dog? I know the feeling. And it’s a neat trick. But put your fucking gun away and let’s talk.”

  Rollins did reholster his pistol, but he only managed to control his anger by venting it on an unburned log. He stamped the thing till it broke in half and then kicked one section of it till it rolled down the ravine and out of sight.

  The girl helped Gabriel tend to James. His trembling face was bloody and smeared with dirt. Rollins’s boot had bruised and sliced the flesh open in several places, and the boy’s lip had been cut so deeply that blood ran down his chin. The girl said something to him in Spanish, got him to meet her eyes, and so convinced him to let his face be cleaned. She touched him gently, her bound hands still skillful enough to know the proper motions to clean his wounds best. Gabriel watched her, following the directions she gave with her eyes, fetching water when she asked, scrounging up a plate of food. Together they calmed James and made him eat. James’s eyes were wary, but beneath the girl’s care he grew less anxious than he’d been for some time.

  Before long the men decided to damn Dunlop and just ride. Marshall ordered the boys and the girl to mount up, but he stopped Gabriel as he prepared to saddle his horse. He held him at arm’s length and stared him down. The boy held his gaze for as long as he could, then lowered it.

  “You need to be tied too? I see you sulking and thinking and plotting things out. But you ain’t gonna give me any trouble, are you?”

  Gabriel tried not to answer, but eventually he moved his head, a motion that might have been a nervous tic but that passed as a no.

  “Good. You boys don’t need to give us no trouble. You all ride on with us like you’re doing and you’ll be rich men soon. You hear?” He shook Gabriel by the shoulder and moved his face into the boy’s line of vision. “Some of that gold’s yours. You can do with it what you want, but try and do us like Dunlop’s done, and you’re as dead as he is. Deader, I suppose. Where I come from, niggers die slower than whites and in a hell of a lot more pain. I’m a camel’s hair from shooting the whole lot of you and doing this on my own. Believe me.” He released the boy’s arm and called to the others to mount up.

  THE MEXICAN SAW THE LONE HORSEMAN from a half-mile out. He stopped his men, and together they watched him. He asked the man beside him what he saw, and the man told him, confirming that his own eyes were not in error. He led his men forward slowly.

  The horseman stood on a sandstone ridge as the Mexicans rode up. They paused before him. No greetings passed, but the men watched each other and waited.

  You were with them?

  The man answered that he was.

  Have you come to me to die?

  That was not my intention.

  Were you part of their crime?

  The man answered that he felt some guilt because he had been there and had been unable to stop them but that no, he had not taken part in the crime. He wished with all his heart that it had not happened, and he prayed for the family’s forgiveness.

  The son cocked an eyebrow. He studied the man closely: his honest, sun-reddened face, the deep hurt in his blue eyes, the slope of his shoulders. He had not expected one of them to look like this.

  Why are your hands tied?

  The man told him. The others sat silent, looking between the stranger and their friend.

  The son listened. He touched his mustache with his fingers, felt the give of the hairs against his skin.

  You don’t know what happened, do you?

  The son helped the bound man dismount from his horse. He sat with him on the ground a little distance from the others, who watched with mistrustful eyes. The son told him the truth of his family, of their fate, and the other man, the Scot, dropped his head and cried and tried to speak but couldn’t find the words. The son looked away and waited.

  The Scot tried to find the words to share his grief over the other’s loss, but again words failed him. The son nodded, but he said, This thing that was done to my family was not God’s work. It was not in the plan of his universe. It was something that God had no hand in. Sometimes man forgets himself and thinks he is God, but he is not, and nothing good can come of this. Sometimes the acts of man rip open wounds in the world that cry to be healed but that can’t be. Perhaps they can only be bandaged. Maybe not even that.

  But you’ll try?

  I will. What would I be if I didn’t?

  They were silent for some time. The horses nearby cropped the grass. The men watched them and watched the horizon and smoked. Eventually the son rose and pulled a knife from his boot. He asked the Scot about his missing sister; the man told what he knew. The son breathed in the news, closed his eyes for a second to control it, then knelt and cut the ropes that bound the man’s hands.

  Go with God.

  He met the man’s eyes and studied them, checking once more that he was not making an error, then he turned and signaled with his hand for the others to mount up. They did so, although they cast glances at the young man and seemed to think that all was not as it should be.

  The son was astride his horse and had turned it to the west before the Scot called to him. He turned. The Scot asked his question. The Mexican nodded his answer and waited as the other mounted up.

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS PASSED IN A BLUR OF MOTION that halted only late in the evenings. They’d come into a high, dry land, baked by the unrelenting Arizona sun, through which only the barren ghosts of rivers ran. Water had grown increasingly scarce for some time, but now they found themselves eating up miles of desert without the slightest sign of moisture. The horses had little forage. They all showed signs of fatigue. The girl’s gelding walked with tender-footed steps, and Rollins’s black mare grew too weak to ride. She was let loose in the wilderness, and Rollins mounted the spare horse taken from the Mexicans. He rode away without a backward glance. The horse watched them go, seemed for a moment to consider following, and then decided against it.

  Early that evening the group shared a few cans of tomatoes, their juice more delicious than Gabriel had ever imagined. His share was so small, however, that when they finally stopped, just after midnight, he sat with a dry mouth, sucking what moisture he could from the grease of bacon fat. The men had grown increasingly surly and taciturn. Rollins complained of a “stomping” headache. Dallas was a silent ghost of his normal self, although this had only partially to do with his fatigue and dehydration. Marshall had found out that Dallas had dumped some of their tinned tomatoes back at the Mexican homestead so he could use the space for mescal. He’d hit the boy hard enough to lay him out, then threatened to make him drink the foul liquid till he puked the stuff up and then make him drink it again.

  None of the men showed any interest in the girl, and neither did they stop her from sitting with James and Gabriel, the only two with whom she voluntarily shared space. On
ce the men were all asleep, she roused the two boys, produced a tin of tomatoes, and shared it with them. She made sure that each drank slowly, and made it clear through gestures that James should let the moisture soothe his lips.

  Gabriel thanked her, the first words he had actually spoken to her, but she shook away his thanks and hid the empty can. She slept between the two boys, again speaking with gestures that made it clear she would do so as long as neither of them touched her. They didn’t, but as the night grew cool Gabriel swore he could feel heat coming off her body. He looked at her outline in the starlight and felt something for her that was not desire, something that was deeper, as if he saw in her all that he had ever seen of things kind, of things beautiful and feminine, and of God and mother. He felt no desire, save for the bone-deep longing for the world to be set right once more.

  THE ENTIRETY OF THE NEXT DAY WAS SPENT EXPLORING a canyon that roughly followed their course west. The group dropped down into it with the hope of finding the stream that had carved it. But they found a dry creekbed choked with house-sized boulders. For much of the way the canyon was so narrow and jumbled that they couldn’t even ride their horses but had to lead them instead. They climbed out of the canyon around dusk, seared and hollow versions of the people they had been that morning. The horses hung their heads low and sniffed the soil for moisture and shook their heads at the folly that had brought them here. James’s horse threw a shoe coming out of the canyon. Gabriel had to hold her hind leg cupped in his armpit as Rollins chiseled away at the horse’s hoof wall and then banged a new shoe in place with a fury that seemed a punishment. Dallas’s pony watched the procedure, then stamped the ground with her right hoof as if demanding an end to this madness that very instant. But it didn’t end.

  That night the three adolescents again shared the evening’s space. Again the girl made it clear she was not to be touched, and again she produced a can of tomatoes and shared it equally among them. James broke down crying as she fed him, the tears slowly progressing down his cheeks and into the corners of his lips. The girl smiled when she saw this and said something to him that she found humorous. But later she whispered to calm him, words of no lullaby and words that neither boy could understand but that brought some semblance of peace nonetheless.