The first night out I let Brad vent his anger over what had happened, but it wasn’t until the second night that I really talked with him about it. We were sitting watch together by the fire, our rifles beside us, and Callie was asleep beneath some blankets a few yards away, tucked between two boulders. Despite Kiri’s parting gift of absolution, I took the blame for everything; but he told me that Kiri wouldn’t have said what she had unless she’d meant it.
‘She woulda gone ridin’ sooner or later,’ he said. ‘She wanted you to know that. But that don’t mean I forgive you.’
‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘But I ’spect you’re liable to forgive me ’fore I forgive myself.’
He just sniffed.
‘I never told you I was perfect,’ I said. ‘’Fact, ain’t I always tellin’ you how easy it is for men and women to screw each other up without meanin’ harm to nobody? I thought you understood about all that.’
‘Understandin’ ain’t forgivin’.’
‘That’s true enough,’ I said.
He shifted so that the firelight shined up one side of his face, leaving the other side in inky shadow, as if his grim expression were being eclipsed. His lips parted, and I thought he was going to say something else, but he snapped his mouth shut.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Nothin’,’ he said.
‘Might as well spit it out.’
‘All right.’ He glared at Callie. ‘She shouldn’t oughta be here. I mean if we find mama, she ain’t gonna want to see her with us.’
‘That may be,’ I said. ‘But Callie’s got her own needs, and she needs to be here.’ Brad made to speak, but I cut him off. ‘You know damn well if your mama don’t wanna be found, we ain’t gonna find her. We all hope we find her, and we’re gonna try hard. But if we don’t, then it’s important for every one of us that we did try. You may not like Callie, but you can’t deny her that.’
He gave a reluctant nod, but looked to be struggling over something else.
‘Don’t hold back now,’ I said.
‘I thought…’ He turned away, probably to hide his face; there was a catch in his voice when he spoke again. ‘I don’t understand why…Why you and mama had to…Why you…’
‘I can’t tell you why this happened. Shit, I never even could figure out how things got started ’tween me and your mama. The two of us together never seemed to make any damn sense. We loved each other but I think love was something that came from need, ’stead of the other way around.’
Brad jerked his thumb toward Callie. ‘It make more sense with her?’
‘It might have, bad as that may sound to you. But now…now, I don’t know. This all mighta killed it. Maybe that’s how it should be. Anyhow, that ain’t nothin’ we have to deal with this minute.’
The wind made a shivery moan down through the rocks, and the flames whipped sideways. Brad lowered his eyes, scooped up a handful of dust, let it sift through his fingers. ‘Don’t guess there’s any more to be said.’
I let his words hang.
‘I keep thinkin’ ’bout Mama out there,’ he said after a bit. ‘I keep seein’ her like…like this little black dot in the middle of nowhere.’ He tossed dust into the fire. ‘Y’figure anything lives out here?’
‘Just us, now.’ I spat into the fire, making the embers sizzle. ‘Maybe a tiger or two what wanders out to die.’
‘What ’bout Bad Men?’
‘Why’d they want to be way out here? It’s more likely they’re livin’ north of Edgeville up in the hills.’
‘Clay told me he’d met somebody lived out here.’
‘Well, Clay wasn’t no big authority now, was he?’
‘He wasn’t no liar, either. He said this fella come in once in a while to buy shells. Never bought nothin’ but shells. The fella told him he lived out on the flats with a buncha other men. He wouldn’t say why. He told Clay if he wanted to learn why, he’d have to come lookin’ for ’em.’
‘He’s just havin’ some fun with Clay.’
‘Clay didn’t think so.’
‘Then he was a fool.’
Brad gave me a sharp look, and I had the feeling he was seeing me new. ‘He ain’t a fool just ’cause you say he is.’
‘Naw,’ I said. ‘There’s a hell of a lot more reason than that, and you know it.’
He made a noise of displeasure and stared into the flames. I stared at them, too, fixing on the nest of embers, a hive of living orange jewels shifting bright to dark and back again as they were fanned by the wind. The glow from the fire carved a bright hollow between the two boulders where Callie was sleeping. I would have liked to have crawled under the blankets with her and taken whatever joy I could in the midst of that wasteland; but Kiri was too much on my mind. I wished I could have limited my vision of her to a black dot; instead, I pictured her hunkered down chanting in the darkness, making her mind get slower and slower, until it grew so slow she would just sit there and die.
I straightened and found Brad looking at me. He met my eyes, and after a long moment he slumped and let his head hang; from that exchange I knew we had been thinking pretty much the same thing. I put my hand on his arm; he tensed, but didn’t shrug it off as he might have the night before. I saw how worn down and tired he was.
‘Go and get some sleep,’ I told him.
He didn’t argue, and before long he was curled up under his blankets, breathing deep and regular.
I lay back, too, but I wasn’t sleepy. My mind was thrumming with the same vibration that underscored the silence, as if all the barriers between my thoughts and the dark emptiness had been destroyed, and I felt so alive that it seemed I was floating up a fraction of an inch off the ground and trembling all over. A few stars were showing as pale white points through thin clouds. I tried to make them into a constellation, but couldn’t come up with a shape that would fit them; they might have been the stars of my life, scattered from their familiar pattern, and I realized that even if we could find Kiri, I was never going to be able to put them back the way they had been. Life for me had been a kind of accommodation with questions that I’d been too cowardly or just too damn stupid to ask, and that was why it had been blown apart so easily. If Kiri hadn’t been the victim of the piece, I thought, having it blown apart might have been a good result.
I made an effort to see what lay ahead for us. The way things stood, however, there was no figuring it out, and my thoughts kept drifting back to Kiri. I stared off beyond the fire, letting my mind empty, listening to the wind scattering grit across the stones. At last I grew drowsy, and just before I woke Callie to stand her watch, I could have sworn I saw one of the tiny pale stars dart off eastward and then plummet toward the horizon; but I didn’t think much about it at the time.
Five days out, and no sign of Kiri. Her trail had vanished like smoke in a mirror, and I did not know what to do. Five days’ ride from Edgeville was considered an unofficial border between the known and unknown, and it was generally held that you would be risking everything by continuing past that limit. Nobody I’d ever met had taken up the challenge, except maybe for the man in the bubble car. We had enough supplies to keep going for a couple more days, yet I felt we’d be wasting our time by doing so and I decided to bring the matter up that night.
We camped in a little depression among head-high boulders about fifty yards from the base of a hill that showed like a lizard’s back against the stars, and as we sat around the fire, I made my speech about returning.
After I had done, Callie said with some force, ‘I ain’t goin’ back ’til we find her.’
Brad made a noise of disgust. ‘You got nothin’ to say about it,’ he told her. ‘Wasn’t for you, wouldn’t none of this happened.’
‘Don’t you be gettin’ on me!’ she snapped. ‘There’s a lot about all this you ain’t got the brains to understand.’
‘I’ll say whatever the hell I want,’ he came back.
‘Both of you shut up,’ I said.
T
he fire popped and crackled; Brad and Callie sat scowling at the flames.
‘We’re not gonna argue about this,’ I said. ‘Everybody knows what happened, and we all got reason for being here. We started together and we’re gonna finish together. Understand?’
‘I understand,’ said Callie, and Brad muttered under his breath.
‘Say it now,’ I told him. ‘Or keep it to yourself.’
He shook his head. ‘Nothin’.’
‘We’ll go on a couple more days,’ I said after a pause. ‘If we ain’t found her by then, there ain’t gonna be no findin’ her.’
Brad’s face worked, and once again he muttered something.
‘What say?’
‘Nothin’.’
‘Don’t gimme that,’ I said. ‘Let’s hear it. I don’t want you pissin’ and moanin’ any more. Let’s get everything out in the open.’
His cheekbones looked as if they were going to punch through the skin. ‘If you gave a damn about Mama, you wouldn’t stop ’til we found her. But all you wanna do is to get back home and crawl in bed with your whore!’ He jumped to his feet. ‘Whyn’t you just do that? Go on home! I don’t need you, I’ll find her myself.’
A hot pressure had been building in my chest, and now it exploded. I launched myself at Brad, driving him back against one of the boulders and barring my forearm under his jaw. ‘You little shit!’ I said. ‘Talk to me like that again, I’ll break your goddamn neck.’
He looked terrified, his eyes tearing, but all hell was loose in me and I couldn’t stop yelling at him. Callie tried to pull me off him, but I shoved her aside.
‘I’m sick’n tired of you remindin’ me every damn minute ’bout what it is I done,’ I said to Brad. ‘I know it to the goddamn bone, y’hear? I don’t need no fuckin’ reminders!’
Suddenly I had a glimpse of myself bullying a thirteen-year-old. My anger drained away, replaced by shame. I let Brad go and stepped back, shaking with adrenaline. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. But he was already sprinting off into the night and I doubt he heard me.
‘He’ll be back,’ said Callie from behind me. ‘It’ll be all right.’
I didn’t want to hear that anything was all right, and I moved away from her; but she followed and pressed against my back, her arms linking around my waist. I didn’t want tenderness, either; I pried her arms loose.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘What the hell you think?’
‘I mean with us. I know you can’t be lovin’ to me with Bradley around. But it’s more’n that.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’
I stepped away from the fire, moving off into the dark; the hardpan scrunched beneath my boot heels. The dark seemed to be pouring into my eyes. I felt that everything was hardening around me, locking me into a black mood, a black fate.
‘You know what we need to do?’ I said bitterly, not even looking at Callie. ‘We need to just keep on ridin’…more’n a couple of days, I mean. We should just keep ridin’ and ridin’ ’til that’s the only thing we can do, ’til we’re nothin’ but bones and saddles.’
I guess I figured she would object to that, promote some more optimistic viewpoint, but she said nothing, and when I looked back at her, I saw that she was sitting by the fire with her knees drawn up, holding her head in her hands.
I’d expected my mood would lift with the morning, but it did not, and the weather seconded my gloom, blowing up to near a gale, driving curtains of snow into our faces and obscuring us one from another. I rode with a scarf knotted about my face, my collar up, my eyebrows frosted. My thoughts revolved in a dismal cycle…less thoughts, really, than recognitions of a new thing inside me, or rather the breaking of some old thing and the new absence that had replaced it, solid and foreboding as the shadowy granite of the hills. Something had changed in me forever. I tried to deny it, to reason with myself, saying that a flash of temper and a moment’s bitterness couldn’t have produced a marked effect. But then I thought that maybe the change had occurred days before, and that all my fit of temper had achieved was to clear away the last wreckage of my former self. I felt disconnected from Callie and Bradley. Emotionless and cold, colder than the snowy air. My whole life, I saw, was without coherence or structure. An aimless scattering of noises and heats and moments. Recognizing this, I felt to an extent liberated, and that puzzled me more. Maybe, I thought, this was how Bad Men really felt; maybe feeling this way was a stage in the making of a Bad Man. That notion neither cheered nor alarmed me. It had no colour, no tonality. Just another icy recognition. Whenever Bradley or Callie drifted close, I saw in their faces the same hard-bitten glumness, and whenever we made eye contact, there was no flash of hatred or love or warmth. I recalled what I’d said the night before about riding until we were nothing but bones and saddles, and I wondered now if that might not have been prophetic.
Toward mid-afternoon, the wind dropped off and the snow lightened. What I’d thought were snow peaks on the horizon proved to be clouds, but rocky brown hills burst from the hardpan, leaving a narrow channel between them along which we were passing. Though there was no sign of life other than patches of silverweed, though the landscape was leached and dead, I had a sense that we were moving into a less barren part of the flats. The sky brightened to a dirty white, the sun just perceptible, a tinny glare lowering in the west. I felt tense and expectant. Once I thought I spotted something moving along the crest of a hill. A tiger, maybe. I unsheathed my rifle and kept a closer watch, but no threat materialized.
That evening we camped in a small box canyon cut about a hundred yards back into the side of the hill. I did for the horses, while Bradley and Callie made a fire, and then, with full dark still half an hour off, not wanting any conversation, I went for a walk to the end of the canyon, passing between limestone walls barely wider than my armspan and rising thirty and forty feet overhead. A few thorny shrubs sprouted from the cliffs, and there was an inordinate amount of rubble underfoot as if the place had experienced a quake. In certain sections, the limestone was bubbled and several shades darker than the surrounding rock, a type of formation I’d never seen before. I poked around in the rubble, unearthing a spider or two, some twigs; then, just as I was about to head back to the campsite, I caught sight of something half-buried under some loose rock, something with a smooth, unnatural-looking surface. I kicked the rocks aside, picked it up. It was roughly rectangular in shape, about three inches long and two wide, and weighed only a couple of ounces; it was slightly curved, covered with dust, and one edge was bubbled and dark like the limestone. I brushed away the dust, and in the ashen dusk I made out that its colour was metallic gold. I turned it over. The inner surface was covered with padding.
It wasn’t until a minute or so later, as I was digging through the rubble, looking for more pieces, that I put together the fragment in my hand with the golden helmet that the driver of the bubble car had worn. Even then I figured that I was leaping to a conclusion. But the next moment I uncovered something that substantiated my conclusion beyond a doubt. At first I thought it a root of some sort. A root with five withered, clawed projections. Then I realized it was a mummified hand. I straightened, suddenly anxious, suspicious of every skittering of wind, sickened by my discovery. At length I forced myself to start digging again. Before long I had uncovered most of a body. Shreds of bleached, pale red rags wrapping the desiccated flesh. Bigger fragments of the helmet. And most pertinently, a hole the size of my fist blown in the back of the skull; the edges of the bone frothed into a lace of tiny bubbles. Gingerly, I turned the body over. The neck snapped, the head broke away. I fought back the urge to puke and turned the head. Black slits of eyes sewn together by brittle eyebrows. It was the face of a thousand-year-old man. There was no exit wound in the front of the skull, which meant—as I’d assumed—that the wound could not have been made by a rifle, nor by any weapon with which I was familiar.
It’s strange how I felt at that moment. I wasn’t afraid, I
was angry. Part of my anger was related to memories of that pitiful little man and his red car and his foolhardiness with the apes; but there was another part I didn’t understand, a part that seemed to bear upon some vast injustice done me, one I could feel in my guts but couldn’t name. I held onto the anger. It was the first strong thing I’d felt all day, and I needed it to sustain me. I could understand why apes danced, why tigers howled. I wanted to dance myself, to howl, to throw some violent shape or sound at the sky and kill whatever was responsible for my confusion.
I think my mind went blank for a while; at any rate, it seemed that a long time passed before I next had a coherent thought. I didn’t know what to do. My instincts told me that we should head back to Edgeville, but when I tried to settle on that course, I had the sudden suspicion that Edgeville was more dangerous than the flats, that I was well out of there. I knew I had to tell Brad and Callie, of course. Nothing would be gained by hiding this from them. I just wasn’t sure what it all meant, what anything meant. My picture of the world had changed. Everything that had seemed to make sense now seemed pitiful and pointless, thrown out of kilter by the last day’s ride and my discovery of the body; I couldn’t see anything in my past that had been done for a reason I could understand. I was sure of one thing, however, and though knowing it was not an occasion for joy, it gave me a measure of confidence to be sure of something. The flats were not empty. Something was living out there, something worse than Bad Men. And I knew we must be close to whatever it was. We might die if we were to stay, but I doubted now that it would be by starvation.
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 16
