The sheriff shouted louder than the boy:
“Shut your mouth!”
The deputy raised his gun and aimed at the sheriff’s chest.
“Let him go! He’ll find the killer.”
Bowman was going crazy.
“What was he like? What was his name?”
“I don’t know! No-one in the convoy knew. Just an Englishman, and they said he was blond. He’d left town by the next day.”
Bowman took a step back and began to turn towards the door.
“Don’t move! Stay here, Bowman!”
The sheriff was yelling. The boy cocked his revolver and cut him off: “Let him go. I won’t tell you again.”
Bowman opened the door and turned back to the deputy. The boy nodded at him.
“Go on.”
Bowman closed the door behind him. Walden stamped on the ground. Bowman got in the saddle, one hand on the butt of the Henry. Brezisky, on his cart, asked what was happening.
“We need to get out of here.”
*
Forcing the pace, they reached the outskirts of Santa Fe in the afternoon and decided to avoid the town. Brezisky said that the mountains of Sangre de Cristo, a few miles further on, were a good place to stop. As they approached the mountain peaks covered in forest, Bowman pushed ahead, driving between larches and pines. He followed a winding path, navigable by carriage, until he reached a little lake, a few acres in area, nestled in the hollow of the mountain like the palm of a hand. He went back down the path and waited for Brezisky. It was too late to go hunting, so the two men dined on pancakes and beans, then started drinking. The doctor waited until they were both quite drunk before speaking.
“What happened at the sheriff’s office?”
The name of Penders had been circling Bowman’s head ever since they left Rio Rancho. Nothing but his name and the memory of the smile that went with it. Sergeant Erik Penders had been in Rio Rancho. When Bowman did not reply, Brezisky tried another question.
“How do you feel?”
Bowman looked at him.
“How do I feel? I don’t feel anything.”
“Mr Bowman, can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Your scars . . . Was it this murderer who gave them to you?”
Bowman took Brewster’s flask from his pocket and handed it to the Pole.
“What is it?”
“Dunno. Just plants, but it works. Like laudanum, but stronger.”
Brezisky accepted it eagerly. Bowman drank some too.
“Without this, I couldn’t tell you anything. And it’ll help you sleep afterwards.”
Bowman rose with the sun, his dagger in his belt and the Henry in his hand.
The animals of this mountain, ignored by the pioneers because it contained no gold, were not mistrustful of humans. Bowman was able, without difficulty, to approach a small group of deer grazing in a clearing. The males, the size of bucks, had short, curved antlers and black heads. Their coats were fawn and they had white speckles on their bellies and necks. They smelled his odour but, not associating it with danger, merely went back to grazing. Bowman spotted a young male, maybe eighty or ninety pounds in weight. There were bigger targets to aim for, but he and Brezisky did not have the time or the means to salt the meat. Shoulder leaning against the trunk of a pine tree, he lifted his rifle and lined up the animal’s head in its sights. The gunshot startled the troop, which remained where it was, heads raised and ears pricked, while the young male collapsed. Bowman lowered his gun, moved away from the tree and took a step into the clearing. Their tails sweeping the air, their big round black eyes following him, he continued moving forward until, at last, a large male took a first step and then ran off, the others following it.
Bowman slung the dead deer over his shoulder and walked back to the lake. He hung it from a branch, slit open the belly and removed its innards. He cut the skin around the hooves and then sliced it up to the thighs. He pulled the skin over its head and threw the fur on the grass. Then he untied the carcass and lay it down on a rock by the water. Breaking the joints, chopping the thoracic cage in half, he separated the quarters, the legs and the shoulders, then rinsed his hatchet, his dagger and his blood-covered arms in the lake. Fish came to the surface, drawn by the scraps of flesh.
Brezisky had got the fire going again and was cutting branches from a larch tree. As Bowman sliced up the pieces of meat, the Pole stuck them on stakes around the fire. Soon the odour of thirty pounds of roasting flesh rose through the air. Bowman cut out the heart and the liver, put a flat stone on the embers and waited until it was hot. He tossed bits of offal onto the stone and stirred them with the end of his dagger; while they cooked the meat, he and Brezisky chewed mouthfuls of it.
“What kind of animal is this?”
Brezisky, while picking at his teeth, told him that the Americans called them “pronghorns” or “antelope”. Bowman smiled.
“In Africa, antelopes have horns about three feet long. Some of them weigh nearly five hundred pounds. They run twice as fast as a horse and can leap over almost anything. It takes several lions or tigers to catch one.”
“American antelope are not in the same league, but the meat is excellent. We’ve got enough food to last us quite a while.”
Bowman stabbed a piece of heart and trapped it between his teeth.
“You’ll have plenty to eat, Doc. But you’re going to go your own way after this.”
The Pole smiled at him.
“Is it because you told me your story that we have to go our separate ways?”
“What?”
“I’m not going to try to change your mind, but I do wonder: have you ever stuck around with someone who knows you?”
Bowman turned a piece of shoulder on a spit, walked away from the heat of the fire, and sat in the grass.
“I’ve always lived alone. Even before. And what I’m doing now . . . that’s nobody’s business but mine.”
Brezisky rummaged about in his crate in search of some hooch.
“Anyway, your company may well be dangerous. My arteries are no longer in the first flush of youth, but I still hope to build that big house one day. I’ll go my way, dear friend, don’t you worry. But you must ask yourself that question.”
“It might happen. But for now, it’s impossible.”
The doctor thought for a moment.
“There’s an island in Japan where the men and women all live to a hundred years old. Bloody fish-eaters! Our lives and our world use us up much faster than that. You’re not as old as me yet, but life has been hard to you. Don’t wait until you’re my age, Mr Bowman, because solitude becomes difficult to fight. Having said that, I am not in your skin.”
Brezisky coughed and looked at Bowman.
“Excuse me. That’s not what I meant.”
The sergeant hesitated for an instant, then smiled at the Pole. The doctor smiled back at him and started laughing, his mouth almost toothless from too much alcohol.
“On the other side of the mountains, you have the choice between taking the Denver track, which goes through a few towns where the gold-panners go, or following the Rio Grande. On one bank, you’ll find the same convoys you’ve been seeing recently; on the other, just desert plains. Water isn’t a problem if you don’t move away from the river. You can do some hunting, but you have to like rabbit or wild horse, no offence to your mustang. If you want to be alone, the Rio Grande is the best route for you.”
Brezisky gave him a bag containing beans, wheat flour and the rest of his coffee.
“I’ll be passing through a town soon, and, as I think I know where you’re headed, you’ll need this more than I will.”
Bowman offered to pay him for the food.
“A bit of generosity wouldn’t hurt this country, Mr Bowman. Nor would a bit of friendship. Thank you again for that marvellous decoction. I don’t know what the old herbalist added to the hemp, but it was definitely a success. Did you know that Mr Washington
, the first president of the United States, himself grew that excellent psychotropic? Although I imagine he preferred it in the form of fabrics and American flags.”
Bowman smiled.
“Probably better if you don’t go back through Rio Rancho.”
“Thank you for your concern, but that was not my intention.”
“Good luck.”
“Mr Bowman, there are still only a few roads in this damned country. I hope we will meet again. Although it is probably absurd to drink to your success, I wish you good luck at least. And when the war comes, try to get as far away from it as you can.”
“The war?”
“Lincoln and the northern businessmen will certainly win the next election. The South has just announced that it will secede if Lincoln is elected. The country will be cut in half.”
“I don’t make war anymore, Doc. No chance.”
Brezisky raised his jug of hooch and his mule started away.
*
Arthur Bowman rode into the woods of Sangre de Cristo. From the northward slope he saw two paths: the green line of the Rio Grande crossing the grey plains, straight ahead of him, and, further west, the pale line of the main track rising towards Pueblo and the Colorado mines. He turned towards the river but did not leave the mountain straight away. He stopped near a spring, unloaded the bags from his horse, and let it graze freely. Then he took his rifle and followed the tracks of antelope. He brought a forty-pound female back to the spring. Once he had chopped up and quartered the animal, Bowman sharpened his knife and cut the meat into thin slices, which he laid out to dry in the smoke from the fire. Walden stood dozing by the stream. Bowman took out his writing materials.
I have described journeys that lasted weeks in ten words. Now I have to write pages to describe a few hours that I spent in Rio Rancho. I found him. It’s Penders.
I don’t know what to think. If I’d rather it had been Peavish.
In Rio Rancho, a sheriff had hanged a negro in the middle of a village and I sat there watching the body swing. The negro had not done anything except for seeing Penders, and maybe even the murder. Captain Reeves said it wasn’t my fault, that the murderer wasn’t his fault either. So what about that hanged man? The sheriff in Rio Rancho saw my scars and for the first time I saw someone who thought they looked good. I think he admired them. I discovered that other men, who did not come from the same place as us, can also be as mad as Penders.
Today I said goodbye to a Polish doctor who wished me good luck and told me he was a friend.
Walden is standing in the grass by the stream and that’s the first time I’ve seen him like that. I wonder if he misses the Pole’s mule.
I passed the point I was scared of when I left Reunion. The point of no return. Because I can’t let blacks die in place of Penders. This started in Burma eight years ago and now I am only three weeks behind him, on the other side of the world.
That’s a summary of everything that’s happened to me but I also have to write something else. My friend the Polish doctor, he said that I could choose to live with people who know me. I thought of you even if we don’t really know each other that well.
It was dark now. Bowman moved close to the fire to trace the last words on a page that was as red as Alexandra Desmond’s hair, then folded the letter he would not send. He fell asleep in the grass, thinking about the desert into which he would descend the next day.
8
It was as if no-one wanted this water. The Rio Grande flowed amid rocks and thorny bushes, tracing its route between the plains and the plateaux, digging channels in the soft rocks without a single tree growing on its banks. It seemed to pass over the earth rather than being part of it, seeking its path, always lower down, on this vast, endless brown slab. No tracks except those of wild animals. The river was all his.
In the large gorges, the echo of Walden’s hooves mingled with those of stones rolling down cliffs, pushed into the void by big lizards scurrying away at the sound of his arrival. The mustang slowed down as they went on, not finding any food nutritious enough to revitalise it. Whenever Bowman spotted a dash of green in the landscape – even the smallest plant with its roots in an irrigated crack – he led his horse straight over to it.
The nights were no cooler than the days. Like the river water, the sun seemed to pass over this place without belonging to it. The rocks produced their own heat and their own light. If these dry plains had any kindred, it was the moon, which gave them back their true colours. The same colours as the hanged man in the plaza. In the grey and blue of the night, desert dogs, invisible during the day, ran and barked after rabbits. Insects, turtles, lizards and snakes were the daylight inhabitants, their colours, shells and carapaces blending with the rocks.
There was no shortage of antelope meat. To make a fire, he had to spend an hour looking for twigs, which burned for a long time in little yellow flames that gave no heat. As he had coffee, Bowman continued collecting wood as he walked during the day. Then he stopped. He had nothing left to cook, the nights were hot, and those cold flames, rather than offering him the comfort of company, reminded him of will-o’-the-wisps rising from mass graves on battlefields.
Instead of the green hills he had been dreaming of since he left London, he had found a desert.
Bowman did not write during his crossing, and when he reached Alamosa, after five days and five nights, he would have struggled to say what he had thought about during all that time. He retained the memory of only a few words, repeated like the echoes of Walden’s steps, like the sound of stones rolling to the bottom of the Rio Grande’s riverbed. “Alexandra.” “Arrive.” “Peavish.” “Penders.” “Reunion.” “Sharks.”
Although he neither wrote nor spoke, he did reread Thoreau’s chapter on solitude.
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, he rode past an immense sandbank, sculpted by the wind into dunes. The Rio Grande had shrunk; its shores were greener and more wooded. When he saw the lights of Alamosa, he stopped to let Walden eat, taking the time to conclude this stage of his journey. Arthur Bowman, beard dangling down to his chest, the lines in his face filled with dust, felt good when he entered the little town.
*
Alamosa was nestled in a forest of trees that he did not recognise, with pale, smooth trunks, their branches covered with little white balls that looked like exploded grains of cotton. There were a dozen buildings, each constructed in a small clearing made by pioneers. No shops, no inns, nothing but white farmers and livestock owners who had gathered to work together, or at least to live close to each other. Bowman’s arrival was met with curiosity, firstly from the children, then from the men on the doorsteps of their houses, and lastly from the silhouettes of women at the windows. It was the cleanest and most peaceful village he had seen up to now. On the opposite bank, facing houses with brick chimneys, was another village. Or rather a camp. Cabins made of branches, fires on the ground, chickens and dogs running free, scruffy children playing with them. The Indians who lived there were strangely dressed, wearing only bits and pieces of European clothes – a top or a pair of trousers – mixed with their traditional cotton garb. At first sight, there appeared to be two or three times as many as Indians as whites, separated by the river in which some rocks had been rolled to form a sort of bridge. Bowman advanced slowly between the houses, turning his eyes from one side to the other of this two-faced village. The contrast between the perfection of the whites and the messy informality of the Indians
was striking, like a military garrison located next to a refugee camp.
A solid-looking man with a chinstrap beard and red cheeks came over to Bowman with a smile. Bowman pulled on the reins and Walden reluctantly came to a halt.
“God bless you, my son. Welcome to Alamosa, the Lord’s own country.”
The first words he had heard in six days.
Bowman decided not to stay, asking simply if he could buy some food and how to find the road to Pueblo. Each loaf of bread, each bean and each ounce of flour he received in exchange for his money was twice blessed. He asked if he could buy some alcohol and received only advice about the benefits of abstinence. After that, the negotiations became more difficult and the tone of the exchanges less friendly. Bowman felt sure that, if he’d crossed the Rio, he would have got what he wanted from the Indians. The only other things he was able to obtain were some tobacco and directions on the best way to get out of the village. He left Alamosa with strange images in his mind. Of women and girls staying behind closed doors, lurking behind windows, while all the men came out of the houses. Of Indians wearing hand-me-down clothes from the whites. The wild children, only just evangelised, with their skin of many colours, from the dark skin of the Indians to the paler skin of the Mexicans and the white children running around the campfires after chickens. And of that stone bridge that connected and separated the evangelists, all those good, dignified fathers, from the Indian women. He left this green, fresh paradise behind him, but before continuing east towards Pueblo, he stopped one last time by the river.
After removing the load from Walden’s back, Bowman took all his clothes off and, pulling on the halter, led the mustang into the middle of the river. He splashed and rubbed it until the horse had had enough and left the river at a gallop, rolling itself in the dust as soon as it could. Bowman pulled out a few handfuls of grass, folding and twisting them together to make a sort of flannel. Leaning his head against a rock, he let the cool water flow over his body. Then he used stones to build a little dam against the shore. On the smooth surface of this tiny pond, bent over his reflection, Bowman trimmed his beard with his knife. He shaved himself the best he could in this sky-coloured mirror and cut his own hair. He washed his clothes on a stone, stretched them out to dry in the sun and lay in the grass to take a nap, waking in the early evening and lighting a fire close to the water.
Retribution Road Page 33
