Damnation Road

by Max McCoy

  “Oh, my,” Anise said.

  “All of the great English heroes have been outlaws, from Robin Hood to Henry Morgan,” Weathers said. “Even our late Victorian hero, the explorer Captain Sir Richard Burton, was a scoundrel.”

  “Now, Uncle.”

  “Oh, your father would have told you the same, because he knew Burton—and undoubtedly picked up some of his worst habits from the man. I can only thank God that Udall never fathered a child during his many forays into native cultures—miscegenation is the most heinous of sins.”

  “Uncle!”

  “All right,” Gamble said. “But I insist we dose the fire now and sleep in shifts.”

  “I will take the first watch,” Weathers said.

  “Then you have custody of the shotgun,” Gamble said, handing over the Model 97.

  “It is heavy,” Weathers said. “And quite unlike the doubles I am used to.”

  “It works a little differently,” Gamble said. “There’s already a round in the chamber. You have to pull the hammer all the way back to full cock before it will fire. It’s on half cock now, which is safest—that way it doesn’t discharge if the gun is dropped or the hammer gets bumped. Once fired, to chamber a new round, you pull the pump back like this and throw it forward again. The magazine holds five rounds.”

  Weathers nodded.

  “Wake me when you judge it to be midnight,” Gamble said.

  That night, he dreamed again of Missouri. Again, he was a boy. But this dream was not something woven of fear and regret, but instead was a memory made real.

  It was an evening in the early spring—late March, perhaps, but not yet April. The war was still years off. His father had come in from the fields. They had eaten together as a family at the small table in a corner of the cabin, and even his mother seemed content.

  His father scooted his chair back from the table, packed his cob pipe with tobacco, and held a match to the bowl. He blew out the match and smiled through the smoke.

  “What did you learn today, Jacob?”

  “We drilled on Reverse Oval Capitals,” Jacob said. “Forever.”

  “It is difficult to write properly without the Reverse Oval Capitals,” his father said. “I am quite mad about them myself, and endeavor to use them frequently.”

  “John, don’t tease the boy,” his mother called.

  “I’m not teasing,” his father said. “There is nothing so beautiful as good penmanship. What else did you study today? History? Math?”

  “We discussed the traitor, Senator Benton.”

  “Traitor?” his father cried. “Why, Old Bullion was no traitor. He called for a return to hard money and to hell with the banks and paper money printed by the bushel basket. There is no substitute for gold. You remember that.”

  “Mister Everett said Benton had betrayed Missouri by declaring against slavery and that he was glad the old man was dead and could do no more harm.”

  “Old Bullion was a Democrat, first and last,” his father said. “He was right to oppose the peculiar institution—as I do. Just don’t tell the preacher Larkin Skaggs those sentiments, or we’ll be run out of the Baptist Church.”

  “No more politics,” Eliza Gamble called. “The boy already gets in enough fights.”

  “All right,” his father said, reaching for the old fiddle that was hanging from a peg driven into the rough-hewn wall. “A music lesson, then. Son, there are some that say this is the devil’s box—an instrument for damnation—but I say otherwise. It can praise God as well as any human voice, perhaps better. Here, son. Take it. Tell me what you feel.”

  Jacob took the fiddle. It was light, much lighter than he expected, considering the amount of sound his father could coax from it. He ran his thumb over the strings and the body of the fiddle thrummed with life.

  “Try the bow,” his father said.

  Jacob took the bow in his left hand.

  “No, use your right,” his father said.

  Jacob switched hands, put the fiddle in the crook of his arm as he had seen his father do, and awkwardly drew the horsehair over the strings near the bridge. A most terrible cry emanated from the fiddle, as if it were being tortured.

  His father laughed.

  “It gets easier,” his father said. “Hold the bow loosely in your hand, as if it were a feather. Yes, that’s it. Now, draw it lightly over the strings, keeping the speed steady.”

  Jacob tried again, but the result was hardly better than the first time.

  “I can’t do it,” he said.

  “You will, in time,” his father said. “Just as you now effortlessly make those Reverse Oval Capitals, you will be able to do this.”

  His father took the fiddle and the bow, put it in the crook of his right arm, held the bow poised for a moment over the instrument, and then began an old Irish ballad. The music was at once beautiful and sad and when his father had played the last note, the mood lingered.

  “It has a voice,” Jacob said.

  “Yes, it does,” his father replied. “It is my voice, the things that I feel, and the fiddle can say things for which there are no words. Without it, I am less than myself. With it—and you, and your mother— I am whole. We speak the language of men. This, the language of angels.”

  Jacob nodded.

  “When I am gone—and we all go away some day, every one of us—then this fiddle will be yours, and so, too, will be the language of both men and angels.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is the fiddle, Jacob?”

  Gamble woke. He sat up. The fiddle—of course, it was the fiddle, left behind in Kansas.

  THIRTY

  The scrubby plateau was layered in mist and surrounded by rugged red-walled cliffs, and scattered about were scalding pools of water that sometimes surged, bubbled, and spat. As the dappled gray stepped carefully along the edge of the pool, Jacob Gamble leaned over and stared at the unquiet water. The animal was made uneasy by the steam rising from the surface, and the phenomena seemed a bit unnerving to Gamble as well.

  “Boilings,” Gamble said. “Didn’t know there were any within five hundred miles.”

  “What do you suppose heats the water?” Weathers asked.

  “Some kind of volcanic action would be the rational explanation,” Gamble said, turning in the saddle. “But as spooky as this place is, it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out to be the fires of hell itself.”

  “I find the landscape rather placid,” Anise said.

  “Peaceful can also be spooky,” Gamble said. “You die up here, and nobody but the wolves might find your body for the next hundred years.”

  “Perhaps,” Anise said. “But what a place to spend eternity.”

  They continued riding. The day wore on and the mist disappeared and they gained another thousand feet in elevation and the ground became even more rocky. Above them was a chimneylike spire of red rock that looked as if it had been built by a very drunk bricklayer. At the top of the spire was a jagged opening.

  “Eye of the Needle?” Gamble asked.

  “Yes,” Anise said. “We’re close, now.”

  “What do you suppose our elevation is?” Weathers asked.

  “Six or seven thousand feet, I reckon,” Gamble said. “But I could be wrong—this is not my kind of country. Back in Missouri, any rock over a couple of thousand feet is called a mountain.”

  “Do you miss it?” Anise asked.

  “Like I miss my mother.”

  “Think you’ll ever see it again?”

  “There’s about the same chance of me seeing Missouri again as there is of me ever seeing her,” Gamble said. “I came to the West because I became just a bit too notorious to remain home. Don’t think I can return until I’m good and dead.”

  By mid-afternoon they had come to a massive rock cliff, banded in black and red, as sheer and formidable as the wall of an ancient castle. Near the top of the cliff, fifty feet above them, was a weathered oval void in the rock, and set beneath the overhanging arch
was an edifice built of many thousands of flat, bricklike stones. A T-shaped window was set in the middle of the structure, and it was flanked on each side by four square windows, adding to the castlelike appearance.

  “It is even more magnificent than you described, my dear,” Weathers said enthusiastically, his head cocked back, his hands crossed over the saddle horn. “Have you ever seen anything like it, Mister Gamble?”

  “Once,” Gamble said. “In Arizona Territory, but on a smaller scale. That place had critters in it.”

  “Bears and mountain lions are common,” Anise said, dismounting from the strawberry roan. “You have to be careful not to get cornered in a cave or a narrow place.”

  “Not the kind of critters I meant,” Gamble said. “So, the treasure cave is up there? In the pueblo?”

  “Some distance behind that big one, yes,” Anise said. “This is the corner property of a city that stretches down both sides of a narrow canyon on the other side.”

  “The Apache lived here?”

  “No,” Anise said. “This is considered the ancestral homeland, but the Apache never inhabited these dwellings. The tribe has only been in this area for a few hundred years, and these buildings are far older. Geronimo said that no human being ever slept up there, that this is where the gods lived during their time on earth.”

  “What’s this place called?”

  “Doesn’t have a name, at least not in English,” Anise said.

  “And how do we get up there?”

  “See those holes drilled into the cliff? There used to be a catwalk that led up there to that window shaped like the letter ‘T,’” she said. “We’re going to chop some wood, jam it in those holes, and string a rope to the top.”

  “Afraid it was something like that,” Gamble said. “You should have found somebody younger for this.”

  Gamble thrust a pine stake as thick as his forearm into the hole in the cliff wall a foot above his head, placed the toe of his left boot into a hole at his knee level, and raised himself up. He was more than halfway to the cliff dwelling.

  “You’re going too fast,” Anise said.

  “I’m going fast because I’m scared,” Gamble said, pausing to adjust the coil of rope over his shoulder. “If I go any slower, I’m going to freeze and they’ll have to peel me off this cliff come next spring.”

  “Don’t think about how far up you are.”

  “That helps me not to think about it, thanks.”

  He reached overhead and stabbed another hole, found another foothold with his toe, and placed his weight on his left foot. Then his foot slid out of the hole and he was left dangling from the stake, his boots skittering on the cliff.

  “Sorry,” Gamble called, finding another foothold.

  “For God’s sake, can’t you tie that rope off to something?” Weathers called.

  “There’s nothing to tie it to, at least not yet,” Gamble said, then grunted as he pulled himself up. “If I dash my brains out on the rocks below, will you do humanity a favor and just leave my body there, as a warning to others?”

  “You have a peculiar sense of humor,” Anise said.

  “Everything about me is peculiar,” Gamble said. “My sense of humor is simply extra peculiar.”

  Ten minutes later, he heaved himself up into the T-shaped window and sat for a moment, panting. His face was slick with sweat and his pulse was drumming in his ears.

  “Throw the rope,” Anise called.

  “Let me tie it off first,” he said, looking over the interior. There were stairways going off each side, off kilter, and the back wall was open, allowing a view of the canyon behind, with pueblos dotting the cliff wherever there was an arch or protruding ledge.

  “Gods, hell,” Gamble said. “They look like wasp nests.”

  He tied the end of the rope to a beam protruding from an inside wall, then tested it with his weight. Satisfied it would hold, he walked over to the T-shaped window, uncoiling the rope as he went.

  “Ready?” he called.

  “I’ve been ready,” Anise said.

  He tossed the rope.

  “Got it,” she said.

  In two minutes, she was standing beside Gamble, gazing out of the T-shaped window to the east. The valley stretched beneath them, trees and rocks and the occasional glint of water. Standing like a sentinel on the not-too-distant horizon was the Eye of the Needle.

  “It’s just as I remembered it,” she said. “My God, but I have waited a long time to be here. But it was worth it. It was worth it, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Gamble said. “We haven’t found the treasure yet. Ask me later.”

  “Of course,” Anise said. “How foolish of me.”

  She waved at her uncle. He removed his hat and used it to wave back. The shotgun was slung over his shoulder.

  “Now, we have to wait?” Gamble asked. “Until dawn.”

  “No,” Anise said, a trace of sadness in her voice. “We don’t have to wait. We can get on with it.”

  “But the solstice?” he asked. “Celestial fireworks?”

  “No reason to wait,” she said. “There’s no light show, no finger of God to point the way, no celestial event to be witnessed through the needle. It will be just another dawn. No fireworks.”

  Gamble stared at her.

  “You almost had me believing in it,” he said. “But why all the nonsense? Why would you make up such a thing?”

  “I never said there would be fireworks. I just said we had to be here by the solstice, that’s all. And we’re here, that’s what counts.”

  “But—”

  Anise pressed a slender finger to her lips.

  “You were hired to get us here and you did, gunslinger,” she said. “The answer to the whys and wherefores were never part of the deal.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Gamble said. “Again.”

  “You’ve been done no harm.”

  “I was lied to.”

  “No, you lied to yourself.”

  “And your uncle?” Gamble asked. “Does he know about the solstice surprise? That there isn’t one?”

  “Lower your voice,” she said. “Do not speak of my uncle. There are things you do not understand.”

  “A damned many things, apparently.”

  She put her hands on her hips.

  “You have not been a paragon of truth yourself.”

  “I’m an outlaw, remember? Outlaw. People expect me to lie.”

  “You think I have lied about the gold?”

  “Almost certainly,” he said.

  She crossed her arms.

  “All right,” she said. “We shall see.”

  She leaned out over the cliff.

  “Uncle,” she called. “We are going to do some scouting. Will you be all right?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Reconnoiter the old place and tell me what you find. But you have to wait until the morning for the treasure cave, is that right?”

  She hesitated.

  “Yes, Uncle,” she said. “That’s right. It will be revealed at first light.”

  “Splendid,” Weathers said.

  Anise glanced at her feet.

  “He is an inveterate reader of Rider Haggard,” she said. “The notion has made him happy. Tomorrow, he thinks the sun will shine through the Eye of the Needle and reveal a treasure door in the cliff face, guarded by skeletons and rattlesnakes.”

  “And how do you intend to handle tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But no matter what I do, it will break the old man’s heart. But I can’t think of that now. Just shut up about it, will you. Follow me.”

  She led Gamble up the right-hand staircase, across a narrow ledge, and into a larger room. As they walked across the dirt floor, Gamble paused to pick up a corncob. It was so old and dessicated that it weighed almost nothing.

  “Gods, huh?” he asked. “Last time I checked, the gods didn’t eat corn on the cob.”

  “Not your gods, perhaps,” s
he said.

  Gamble crushed the cob in his fingers.

  She exited a doorway, went down another flight of stone steps, and followed a path that terminated at the opening to a natural cave. On either side of the entrance were badly weathered petroglyphs. The carvings depicted skeletal figures and coiled rattlesnakes.

  Gamble laughed.

  “They’re as real as anything else in this world.”

  “Right,” Gamble said. Then he tried to duck into the cave, but she grabbed his sleeve.

  “You can’t,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “The sacred words,” she said. “Turn away.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Turn away.”

  Gamble turned his back while Anise knelt. He heard her scraping the ground with a pebble, and then heard her whisper something that sounded like no human language he had ever heard before. Then she stood and told him it was all right.

  “Go on,” she said.

  He ducked into the cave and saw nothing but darkness. He fumbled in his pocket for his matches, found one, and struck it against the rock wall. The match flared and he could see the cave was large, about the size of his entire boyhood cabin in Missouri, and there were objects piled against the walls.

  He went to the wall and began to slowly walk, holding the match. There were swords black with rust, a dented breastplate and a battered helmet to match, a heavy Spanish bit, reed arrows with obsidian points, a flintlock rifle with half the stock missing, stone clubs, a Walker Colt with a badly rusted cylinder, a Springfield rifle with a burst barrel, and rotting bundles of sticks and bone whose meaning Gamble could only guess.

  “What do you see?”

  “History,” Gamble said.

  The match burned down to his fingers and he dropped it.

  “It’s a war museum,” she said. “Apache culture is based on war. This is their British Museum, their Library of Congress. Every campaign, every victory, every loss. These were not raids, which are a trifling matter to acquire property. These are tokens of war, meant to take the enemy’s life—and his soul.”