Bowman gave up trying to read. A final group of cowherds had just arrived, noisy and drunk, demanding their ration of soup. Bowman listened to them rail and carp. He stood up and pulled back the sheet hung by his bed. The men stopped speaking as soon as they saw him appear: big Mr Bowman, with his bulging eyes.
Reunion was silent and deserted. There was not even a breeze to blow shut the gaping doors of the abandoned houses. Ten people were still hiding out there, scattered in various shacks across the town. The horse snorted, as if to rid its nostrils of the sad air in this place. Bowman lowered his head as he headed towards the widow’s house, his face shadowed by his hat brim from the low rays of the morning sun. She was standing on the porch, shoulders hunched in the cold of dawn. She understood even before he had set foot on the ground, even before noticing the full saddlebags and the travel bag strapped to the saddle. She entered the house and left the door open. Bowman followed her, sitting at the table while she put water to heat on the stove.
He spoke quietly, forcing himself to pronounce the useless words:
“I had some news. Some men from the ranch were talking with mule-drivers in a convoy from El Paso. It happened in Fort Bliss. I’ve resigned from Paterson.”
She put cups, sugar and spoons on the table.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Maybe it’s not connected. In London, after the murder, when people talked about it, there were so many different versions. People invent stuff. So, no, I’m not sure.”
She sat across from him.
“You know perfectly well that that’s not my question.”
He turned his head to the dust-covered window. Through the dirty pane, he could see the distorted outlines of empty houses.
“There’s no point starting this again.”
“I’m not asking you to stay. All I’m saying is that you’re not obliged to pursue this.”
Bowman gathered all his courage, still looking outside.
“And if I did stay?”
She poured the coffee.
“After your arrival, I sent a letter to New York. The Victor Considerant company has agreed to pay for my return to France.”
Outside, Walden was waiting. He stamped and snorted noisily. They remained silent for a moment, bent over their cups. Bowman covered his mouth with his hand, as if to hold back the words.
“And if I came back after finding him?”
“You don’t know if you’ll come back.”
“If I had a reason, that would change everything.”
She stood up and, as on the first day, when he woke up to find himself in her house after the fit, she turned her back on him.
“There’s no point to all these conjectures. You know as well as I do that the whole thing is absurd.”
He took the letters of credit and a wad of ten-dollar bills from his pocket and placed them on the table.
“You said you didn’t want to be sad anymore. As for me, all I know is that I’m still alive.”
She turned around, looked at the letters and the banknotes without any emotion, and then looked at Bowman.
“What do you want to buy with this money?”
“Nothing. All I’ve done with it so far is pay for the funerals of people I didn’t know. Maybe you could do something better with it.”
“I don’t need it.”
Bowman clung to his idea.
“I know one thing. There’s nothing left for us in France or England. You could look for your new place.”
She held her arms tight around her chest, as if to prevent herself breathing.
“Stop.”
“I’ll come back. Even if you’re not here anymore. I’ll have nothing else to do.”
She sat down and put her hands on the table, halting her movement before she touched him.
“I can’t stop you doing that.”
“When are you leaving?”
“In a few weeks, when I’ve got everything organised. Mr Bowman, you have the right to hope, even for something impossible. That is what we came here to do. You shouldn’t force yourself not to.”
“What good would it do?”
At last she moved her hand forward and placed it on his arm.
“It’s just an image, Mr Bowman. A bit of light for the butterflies of the night.”
Bowman looked up and saw her sad smile, her grey eyes welling with tears. He managed to return her smile.
“When I was preparing my things, last night, I thought about something. Soldiers always say they have a woman waiting for them. The most beautiful woman in the world. Those are lies and dreams that mustn’t be broken, otherwise they’re no good anymore. But, for me, for once, maybe it’s true.”
Alexandra Desmond’s fingers tightened around his arm. Bowman gently placed his maimed hand on hers and they remained there like that, in silence, until the strength to enjoy this moment abandoned them.
Bowman got back in the saddle. She walked up to Walden. The horse gloomily placed its head on her shoulder.
“It’s always regrettable to have to say it, but I’m sorry.”
Bowman pulled his hat down over his head.
“That money, it’s the Company’s. Do something good with it. There’d be no better way of spending it.”
He pulled on the reins. Walden began to trot away and the sergeant did not turn around. When he passed Kramer’s house, he did not need to spur the horse; it set off at a gallop on its own.
*
He reached Fort Worth in two hours and, before continuing on the road to El Paso, stopped at a general store to buy food and equipment.
He had kept two hundred dollars for himself. Now he had to make it last as long as possible. The balance he had to find lay somewhere between his own survival, his horse’s survival, and the weight that Walden could bear. A horn-handled dagger, more rustic and much cheaper than the one he’d bought in London; twenty yards of hemp rope; a hatchet; a gallon of oats for his horse and a cloth bucket that he could flatten and put away in the saddlebags; two others in leather, each holding three pints; a pound of lard and two pounds of cornflour; coffee; a tin plate and saucepan; a firebox containing a steel lighter and two flints, a small reserve of tinder and some matches. He exchanged the clothes and shoes he had bought in New York for a long raincoat, a good blanket, some tobacco and a bottle of whiskey, and he swapped his pea jacket and fisherman’s trousers for two pens, a small bottle of black ink and a block of paper. The last thing he bought, for twice the price of his horse, was a .44 Henry rifle with a sixteen-bullet magazine, and enough ammunition to go hunting for twenty days. When he paid his bill – a total of fifty-eight dollars – the shopkeeper threw in a holster for his rifle, a small bottle of oil, and a bottle brush to clean it.
“That’s a lot of stuff. Where are you headed?”
“Fort Bliss.”
“If it’s your first trip out West, don’t worry. A whole heap of people died out there for you. Now, it’s just a question of patience. The only thing that can kill you, apart from the rattlesnakes and a few Comanches, is the food they serve in the Butterfield inns.”
For a lone horseman, the inns were two days apart. Up to the Pe’cos river, the land was well-irrigated. The only arid part was between the Guadalupe Mountains and El Paso, on the last hundred miles of the track. Like all the main roads in the West, the shopkeeper said, it was an old Indian track.
“The redskins know about springs that we haven’t found yet. They even make the journey on foot. But that doesn’t mean it’s any easier with a horse. Those savages don’t drink any more water than lizards and they’re capable of running all day long under the hot sun.”
Bowman walked back to Walden. The horse was in the hotel stable, where it had eaten its fill of feed. Bowman filled the flasks with water, loaded up his new equipment, and walked alongside the horse until the outskirts of town, enough time for the animal to digest its lunch before he tightened the girths over its belly.
Fort Bliss was six hun
dred miles west: a two-week trip if all went well. Behind him, Reunion was still only twenty miles away. Walden snorted when he jumped into the saddle.
“I might lose a few pounds by the time we get there. That’s about all I can do for you.”
The sound of his voice was strange to him, as if he hadn’t heard it for a long time. It hadn’t changed, though; it was just the fact of speaking to himself. The sun was directly ahead of him; he lowered his head and let himself sway in time with the shoulder rolls of his mount.
After leaving Fort Worth in early afternoon, Bowman travelled about fifteen miles before leaving the track and moving away from it for about half an hour. Observing the trees, he wound up discovering a stream bordered by willows and birches. The grass was not very thick yet, but it was already green; with the bucket and the saddlebags on the ground, Walden, tied to a branch, began to eat, lifting his head occasionally to listen to the sounds of the undergrowth. When Bowman returned empty-handed to his camp after a two-hour hunting trip, night was falling and the air was growing cold. He lit a fire, put some water in a saucepan, stirred in the cornflour, made a pancake, and started to cook it. He found flora and fauna that he recognised on this new continent, like that peppery watercress that grew by the stream, which they used to give to the soldiers after long sea-crossings, a cure for the ravages of scurvy. While he knew the plants, though, he was not yet ready to eat the meat. His talents as a huntsman were not up to the mark. A deer and two rabbits had escaped him. Too heavy, too noisy, his reflexes too slow. The animals had fled before he’d even spotted them.
After finishing his meal, he stretched out the raincoat on the grass and lay there fully clothed, pulling the blanket up to his neck. With his head resting on his travel bag, he listened to the crackle of the fire and looked up at the stars in the sky. Unable to sleep, he kept the fire going until dawn. Walden slept leaning against a birch, indifferent to his master’s insomnia. Bowman splashed his face in the stream and, after cooking another pancake and eating a bit of salted meat, he opened his bag, put the Thoreau book on top of it and used it as a desk. On the page he had half filled during the Persia’s crossing, he noted:
I went to Reunion, but there was nothing there. Some men from a convoy in El Paso said in Dallas that there’d been a horrible murder near Fort Bliss and I set off again. In New York, soldiers fired at women and there was one who died in my arms just after I’d got off the boat. I bought a rifle.
He reread his notes, let the ink dry, and folded the page back. Then he took out the block of letter paper he’d bought in Fort Worth, dipped his pen and slowly traced the letters, making them as neat as possible.
Alexandra,
I left Reunion one day ago and I slept by a stream with Walden. I didn’t manage to kill any game and the coffee I made was not as good as yours. I have decided to write to you regularly. Because it’s like having company, like Walden, only prettier, and because soldiers always do that, write letters to the most beautiful woman in the world.
He hesitated, then added a few words before closing the block of paper and tidying up his things:
I hope you will receive this letter one day or that I will be able to bring it to you.
The first inn he reached was called Sweet Water. Around the Butterfield building, a nascent village was taking shape: three huts and a tent. A farrier had put his anvil by the side of the track and, opposite the transport company’s inn, a German couple had set up four chairs and a table under a tarpaulin, serving food to travellers. The competition must be fierce between the inn and this little restaurant, thought Bowman, reading the hand-painted sign by the Germans’ tent: Best food in Sweet Water. Bowman took his horse to the Butterfield stable and sat down under the tarp to eat. The afternoon was almost over, but he decided to push on a little further and to sleep in the woods. For a dollar, man and horse set off once again with bellies full and thirst quenched.
Finding another stream proved no more difficult than it had the night before. Bowman did not try to hunt; he just prepared his fire for the night and, in the last rays of daylight, lay his head down on his travel bag to read a few pages of Thoreau. He began a chapter entitled “Solitude”. The descriptions of nature and Thoreau’s moods meant nothing to him. Seeing the title, he had thought he would learn more about what was happening to him, but the words were foreign to him. All that stuff about a poetic and spiritual fusion with the world went straight over his head. Looking at the forest around him, he did not understand how it could soothe him, how he might, like Thoreau, become one with it. Nature and landscapes, he thought, were just things that men crossed through. Over there, in the camp, the Burmese jungle had never been a source of comfort. He thought again about the green hills he had imagined when he was reading Irving, thinking that perhaps they were like those impossible dreams Alexandra Desmond had talked about: images that must be kept in mind in order not to lose hope, but that did not really exist; like Thoreau’s idyllic cabin, which Bowman finally realised, from the pompous, impassioned descriptions of it, was merely a sort of imaginary ideal. That night, he fell asleep and, when he woke up, he saw Walden leaning down over him, eyes closed, as if the mustang had wanted to sleep while breathing in his odour. Bowman did not write down anything about his journey, but continued his letter to Alexandra. Fighting against the disappointment of writing to someone who would never read his words, he forced himself to write clearly and legibly.
Thankfully there’s only one road crossing this country, because otherwise I think I’d get lost. It’s only been two days since I left but already I don’t know where I am anymore. Walden slept next to me. I think he’s a good horse.
Until he reached Pe’cos, he had to stray further and further from the track to find streams, meaning that his journey took a day longer than the two weeks that a carriage, transporting water, would take to reach El Paso. He avoided the little farms along the path, staying clear of habitations, and began to kill some game. A partridge, a hare and, another day, a young deer of about fifty pounds that he butchered, cooking as much of it as he could in order to keep the pieces for later in his journey. After cutting up his prey that night, Bowman suffered nightmares and woke with a start, shouting so loud that he frightened his horse.
About fifty people lived in the village of Pe’cos. Bowman passed through it without stopping, knowing now that he would have all the water and meat that he needed. For five days, he followed the river north-west, towards the Guadalupe Mountains, and his bad dreams continued. He stopped only once to buy some food and a bottle of whiskey. The Pe’cos river continued northward, but the track to El Paso turned off towards the West. Before entering the arid zone, he stopped at the last inn on this part of the track, buying two extra wineskins and a peck of oats. Dirty and stinking, his back bent by two weeks on a horse, Arthur Bowman entered the white, rocky plain. On the horizon, sixty miles further on, he could make out the silhouettes of mountains. The Butterfield stagecoaches, pulled by a train of fresh horses, crossed the distance in less than a day; he would have to go pretty fast to manage that. Walden broke into a trot as soon as they entered this desert, apparently guessing that the next drop of water he would taste was to be found at the other side of this desolate landscape.
*
Bowman had crossed deserts before, but with the logistics and resources of an army. If Thoreau had undertaken this ride, maybe he wouldn’t have forgotten to talk about the kind of solitude in which nature too can abandon you.
Walden kept going as long as he could before slowing down. Bowman gave him just a small amount of oats in order not to make him thirsty, and shared the water with him. Three wineskins for the horse, one for his rider.
Night had fallen long before they arrived at the mining camp. After 90-degree temperatures during the day, the mercury suddenly plunged. The Butterfield inn, signalled by a lantern over their sign, was located amid the miners’ barracks: long buildings with no lights or windows. Bowman, sunburnt and shivering with cold, knocked a
t the door of the inn. A young boy took care of his horse, then led him to a tiny room full of icy draughts. Bowman collapsed on the soft bed and took the bottle of whiskey from his bag. He drank it slowly, sip after sip, down to the last drop. He was not fighting only against the cold. One day on horseback separated El Paso from Fort Bliss. If Penders or Peavish had gone there, they must have spent the night here. When the nightmares woke Bowman, his sore, reddened face was covered with sweat that the cold air froze to his skin. Wrapped up in his clothes, his blanket, and the inn’s blanket, he shivered and fought against sleep until dawn. He had not felt this bad since leaving London. His old pains returned, familiar whispers in his thoughts, which he began carefully surveying once again. With two bottles in his saddlebags, he set off as soon as the sun was over the horizon.
The salt mine was open-air, in the bed of an old, dried-up lake whose contours, dug into terraces by shovels and pickaxes, grazed the side of the mountain. A raised track, its verges also terraced, crossed over towards the West. At the bottom of the basin, so white it dazzled his eyes, Bowman saw men loading blocks onto carriages; several hundred men. Short, with bow legs, dark skin, cotton clothes, working barefoot on the harsh, burning salt. In summer, these men – who Bowman supposed were Mexicans – must die like sepoys in the hold of a ship. Cool in the shade of carriages and sentry boxes, white men watched the miners, occasionally greeting the horseman who was crossing the mine.
Walden advanced slowly on this white embankment, ears flat, leaving Bowman time to think. The sight of this place reminded him of other places. Construction sites in India, negroes building a bridge, thousands of yellows digging a canal, the muddy building site at Millwall. After the desolation of Reunion, the salt mine was another image in a fresco depicting the interior landscape of Arthur Bowman. He took a bottle of whiskey from his saddlebags as he entered another desert plain, this one not ending in any mountain, with the track still arrowing wide and straight ahead of him. Walden quickened his pace.
Retribution Road Page 30
