by Ryan Ireland
The father and son stayed in their quarters. ‘Stranded at sea can cause men to go crazy,’ his father said.
The boy nodded. Above them men whooped and sang, stomped across the deck. Below them the sea slapped the boat rhythmically. ‘If we stay out of sight, stay quiet, they’ll leave us be.’
And for a time, the crew did leave them alone. The men stayed on deck, cursing at the sky, drinking from the sea. When the rigger died, they ate him too. Blood seeped through the deckboards and dripped on the boy’s bunk. He touched the spot of blood. It was cool and wet. His father didnt notice when he licked it off his fingertip.
At that moment the stranger understood the man. He had to see him as a boy, know what happened, what could never be undone. He had to see the memories of the man and how they were different from what the story was really about. If he bothered to ask the man what happened, it was this. But the stranger knew better—he knew what shaped the man was kept in the darkest wells of his mind, a place where terrifying dreams wake us into being.
ii
At first he tried to take the woman by the hand as a gentleman from another time might. She spat on the stranger, cursed him. He knew then how it had to be. With one hand he seized both of her wrists. With the other hand he grabbed her hair. She screamed. He pulled her from the hovel and out into the grasses. She jerked her head to the side and left him holding a tuft of hair. Stumbling only a few more feet, before the stranger grabbed her by the ankle, she resigned into sobs. Without the crying she might have been a pretty thing. But now her face contorted, tears dragging dark streaks of dirt to her chin. Her breasts swollen with pregnancy heaved with each inhalation.
The stranger sat next to her, his mind far away. Finally, when her tears subsided and she sniffled, she asked if it could be quick.
‘Usted pudiera aprovecharse de mí y irse,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘No puedo perdonar la vida,’ he said. ‘Tengo que acabarlo. Su tiempo aquí se ha acabado.’
The news did not surprise her, she figured this to be the case. Again she asked for it to be quick. ‘Sí,’ the stranger said. He stood and extended his hand. This time, the woman took it and they walked out to a flat rock, to where a wagon broke down years before, splintering its wheel on the stone.
The woman sat on the stone and watched while the stranger pulled the steel band off the outer edge of the wheel. The band held to the wood with tack nails; one of them sliced his fingertip open. He put the finger to his mouth before going back to work. The strip of metal wavered awkwardly as he held it up, gauging its usefulness.
The woman turned her attention elsewhere; she looked out across the plains. The skies were clear, not a chicken hawk or buzzard in sight. The thwap of the rock against the metal pulled her attention back to the stranger. He raised a stone above his head and brought it down against the band again. Where the stone impacted, the metal edge of the band became spiny and dented, forming a jagged blade.
‘¿Será rápido?’ she asked.
And it was.
Pitiful how she whimpered before he swung the blade, how she raised her hand as if this would deflect the blow, how her other hand cradled around her womb as if she could save the unborn from this fate.
The man crossed the plains as he would in the lifetime before, encountering the solitary trees left from antediluvian times and spared being scorched into salt. He saw the occasional being, the troupe of scalpers and a man riding distant on a beast. At night he watched the stars, tried to reach out and touch them while he lay on his back.
The stranger followed. He followed where highways and billboards would eventually slice the land and blot the sky. The horizon remained unbroken, not a guy wire to a radio tower or the vapor trail of a jumbo jet marring the expanse. He walked over a sop of grass still quelling with dew from the night before. In time this place would be quarried, chunks of stone pulled and pulverized and ground down into pea gravel, used to set sidewalks and level commercial housing. While men in hard hats and diesel construction vehicles toted the stone away, bones from dinosaurs would be discovered, discarded and tossed into the tumbler with the gravel.
At night, while the man placed his trust in the long-burned-out stars of a universe bent on crushing itself, the stranger guided himself by the street lamps, casino lights and reflective stripes of the freeway. The stranger would lay down to sleep at dawn, his head resting on a scrap of driftwood or a stone. The sun glowered up from the crags of mountains and baked all that splayed out on the altar of midland America.
Each man had visions—one of the world as it had been, the other inventing the story of destiny as he came upon it. Both of them envisioned the time in the Sargasso. A month, maybe more, had passed since there was any breeze to speak of. Several of the crew committed suicide by weighting themselves down with chains and throwing themselves overboard.
‘Keeps them from being eaten,’ the boy’s father said.
The crew of the ship roamed the deck like sleepwalkers. They burned their clothes and trolled for food naked and despairing, letting the sun take its toll on their bodies. The men’s skin boiled and dripped, ran with blisters and puss. In the night they sodomized each other, taking the boy and his father up to the deck and holding them down.
Up in the crow’s nest the Portuguese sat as a silent sentinel to the events unfolding below. The men called up to him as they beat one another and groped at the unwilling participants, but he ignored them, staring off into the ocean as if there was a place beyond here.
iii
Taking the body of the woman into the hatch proved more difficult for the stranger than he imagined. He stopped from time to time as he tunneled farther downward to scrabble for his baggage. He located the abdomen of the woman and placed his hand across the expanse of her belly. The baby inside stirred; less so than a few moments ago when he last checked, but still alive nonetheless.
He went deeper into the total absence of light to where the soil hardened into stone and the caverns ran slick with moisture. Drips from stalactites echoed. There was still deeper to go. He crawled frantically, following a path from a memory he had yet to form. The palm of his hand slid on the rock and he tumbled forward, the sack and body falling with him. He landed in a shallow pool of water, the bell of the skirt undone and the body in pieces around him.
The water rippled, but instead of coming to a calm around him, the liquid continued to swirl and torrent. The walls of the cavern shook and stones crumbled in on either side. The stranger closed his eyes and did his best to imagine the world he had told himself about.
The man woke in the midafternoon. Some vision—a dream—had been circulating in his head. Something called from the outside world and filtered through his memories and formed into a new experience all together. He sat up. Nearby the mule grazed, lazily swooped his tail at some flies. The man had sweated in his sleep, sweated right through his shirt. No more than a few hours passed since he let slumber overtake him.
He took a canteen from the saddlebag, drank from it. He swore, shook his head. Out on the horizon whence he came there was nothing. Even as he rode away, he cast a glance over his shoulder. A feeling of being watched welled in his gut and propelled him forward.
At the end of the tunnel the sky showed as a spot of blue. The stranger scrambled through, toward the source of light. He heaved stones aside and freed himself from underneath the rubble. He looked around the landscape at the fallen adobe brick tower, at the vultures circling above. If there was a way out of here, he had already taken it. Now was where he needed to stay.
Ruins from the Indians folded limply in the rumpled hills. Little stood as it had decades, centuries before. The bricks, once dried and blocked with sharp edges, had eroded into egg-shaped curiosities, things unable to be stacked. Walls spilled over, the mortar turned to grit and cake. Occasional storms as they blew in this part of the country had taken their toll on the place.
The stranger rested his hands on his hips and gauged the sun
. He figured it to be midafternoon, figured it to be a time when America was still a geographical location. Somewhere hundreds of miles, several time zones away, Johnny Appleseed was littering the Midwest with fruit trees, a stove pan on his head. In the south Pecos Bill wrangled tornados, shot holes in the sky. Hiawatha trolled the rivers of Iroquois territories, trying to bring his people together.
‘Well, then,’ the stranger said aloud. ‘I suppose I have some work to do.’
Four
i
What possessed the man to keep on traveling as he did baffled the stranger. Rarely did the man pause for sleep. He rode on through both day and night, stopping only when the mule tired. Traces of the man became more scant. The stranger picked up his pace until he came to nearly a trot. He seemed to be racing against the day, trying to duck under the sun as it collided with the horizon. If the man slept any length of time, the stranger figured it must be in the saddle. Nightmares woke the man often. And of all nightmares—those realities born from our wakeful lives and perpetuated in our minds—the man thought of his rescue from the ship.
At first both he and his father took it for a hallucination. Dusk and the hours following it on the deck of the ship proved good for this. Every couple nights another man committed suicide because of these visions. Some men murdered men because they were told to do so by long-since-eaten crew members.
‘Do you see it?’ his father asked.
The boy nodded meekly, too afraid to say anything, afraid the other crew might hear, afraid the vision would dissipate. Around them the crew slumbered away, snoring. In the captain’s quarters, the first mate was having his way with a younger deck hand. For the last five nights he came for the boy afterward. Twice his father successfully defended him. Three times now his father had to watch.
The canoe glided stealthily through the water, two shadowed figures inside dipped their paddles and stroked in unison. Behind them, equally as clandestine, came a fleet of canoes. What moonlight there was cast the mystery men’s shadows long into the placid waters.
The father instructed his son to follow him. They clambered down below deck and into their quarters. Above them they could hear the rhythmic thrusting of the first mate sodomizing another boy. Hearing this gave the father pause and he looked at his son. Then he took a kerosene lantern—the only lantern whose fuel hadnt been imbibed. He lit it, held it in one hand.
‘Take the other end of the footlocker,’ he said. The boy did as he was told. ‘If these visitors is what I think they is, tonight ends it.’
The man had not slept for two days. He rode the mule until it staggered off the trail and cantered in a circle in the brush. The man shushed the mule, dismounted and rubbed its muzzle.
‘Been ridin you too hard,’ he said. ‘Suppose we oughta set up here for a day, maybe two.’
Even as he spoke he glanced around, looked down the path, up at the slopes on either side. Alone as he ever was, he knew there were eyes upon him, though he could not see them. As he set up camp, he kept the shiv in hand. Darkness came on quickly here in the depths of the valleys. Soon the black behemoth mountains hulked darker than the sky, which unfurled like singed parchment, blotched indigo and purple, stippled with stars.
He sat upright against a lean tree listening for the sounds of visitors. He squinted into the blackest of the shadows to adjust his vision to the night. Then he shielded his eyes from the glow of the sky and scanned the passage he’d taken between the mountains. It could have very well been a trick of the mind, but the man saw something dart from one shadowed space into another. He clutched the shiv in his hand and squatted by the tree. He stopped breathing and listened. But again there was nothing. The mule snuffled, and in his mind the man cursed the beast for being so noisy. Then, very distinctly, a twig snapped.
Without much further thought the man looked to the mountain. He knew it to be bouldered and littered with scrag. He ran to the incline and grappled at whatever he could. He came to a perch—a flat rock jutting from the slope. He climbed atop the stone table and lay flat on his stomach to peer over the edge. Below, his mule brayed lowly. He watched for some time, squinting against the night, trying to see who prowled about his camp. Eventually he relaxed and rolled onto his back. He would sleep here tonight.
When the boy and his father came back up to the deck with the footlocker, the planked wood beneath their feet ran with blood. The natives from the canoes stood silently over the dismembered bodies of the crew. A hand cut longways—just the ring finger and little finger, most of the wrist—clung to a railing, tendons hanging loose at the end. The Portuguese man hanged from the rigging, his entrails dangling, his feet amputated. The boy stayed close to his father.
‘Got a footlocker a supplies,’ his father said. The natives circled them. Their blades—a scythe, a saber and a sickle—gleamed in the moonlight. ‘My boy and me, we havent eaten nobody, havent killed no one.’
He held the lantern up to illuminate the faces of the natives. They had no eyebrows. Beneath the smears of blood they were tattooed, their nostrils stippled with studs, intricate scarring adorned their foreheads and chests. They were naked.
From the captain’s quarters another native appeared. He ducked as he came through the threshold. Where his nipples should have been, two swathes of scar tissue shined in the lantern light. In his hands he held the head of the first mate. It may have been a thing of fiction in the boy’s recount of the incident, but he believed the first mate’s mouth still moved, his eyes fixated on the last surviving members of the crew. When the native turned his head to speak to his men the boy noticed his ears were cropped flat across the top. He exchanged a few short syllables with the men and they went below deck.
He looked back at the father and son, grunted and squatted. He held the first mate’s head by the scalp in one hand and used a dirk in his free hand to stab out the eyes. When he was finished he set the head on the deck and rested his elbows on his knees.
‘Heard a story once,’ the father said. ‘Heard some fellas bought an island big as a country from some injuns for some stain glass and beads.’
The native stared at them blankly. The boy imagined the natives who disappeared into the shadows just moments ago would spring forth any moment and kill them just as they had everyone else. Still his father spoke. ‘We’re just askin for you to not kill us. I got stuff to trade.’
He motioned to the footlocker and the native nodded. His father unlatched each side and flapped open the top. The natives stepped over the head and inspected the contents of the footlocker. A bird of bright feather flew from the night and perched atop the opened lid. He cooed and the boy and his father exchanged looks. A bird meant the promise of land. First the native shuffled through the miscellany of items, then he tried a few out: holding the telescope up to his eye, examining the maps, unfolding and refolding the jackknife. He did not touch the clothes folded in the bottom of the box.
It satisfied the natives well enough. The native stood and whooped, his jaw moving in unnatural form, his tattooed tongue coming to rest between his teeth. From the shadows the rest of the native men appeared, weapons in hand. The native spoke in whoops and yips, his eyes alighting and his tongue flapping like a rabid animal. The father put his arm around the boy.
They each felt a hand on their backs and they walked to the edge of the deck where the canoes were moored beneath.
The stranger lost the trail of the man. He had not anticipated a pace so vigorous or a man so scant in his markings. For many stretches the stranger ran. He ran through the flats where someday farms with circular fields dictated by irrigation systems would dot the landscape, etching rows of corn that would make them look like LP records to the crop duster pilots. He ran in paths where power lines would one day swoop and dip from one skeletal structure to the next and eventually come to a relay station that rose like the frame of a great cathedral, buzzing with the electricity of a ghost choir.
He cut through a housing plat where balloon construction
homes would crop up overnight and dice up the land with sidewalks, fences and driveways. He followed in the track of a coast-to-coast rail line with oil tankers toting one behind the other like a caravan of fallen silos, boxcars and freighters chugging by like assembly line coffins. He felt the energy of this world pulsate in him; radiation and microwaves, cellular phone signals and fallout—bits of data and memory floated about him as if they had become part of space. And the stranger knew, in the deepest wells of his mind, these broadcasts only appeared to fade or become lost to time. If he could chase a radio transmission far enough—out into the outermost reaches of our solar system, the galaxy and greater universe even—the voices would be just as they were, young as the day the signal was born, old as the day it turned to static on a transistor radio.
And there would be highways with overpasses, roundabouts and single blinking yellow lights, roads lined with streaks of brine and salted for the winter truckers and nine-to-fivers. Routes would be augured through the crests of mountains—thousands of years’ worth of mud and sediments compacting and metamorphing—scooped out by steam-powered crawlers with teethed shovels. The things that thwarted Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea meant nothing to the future. The borders of civilization were leveled by the telegraph wire, plowed under by fiber optic networks, and forgotten by the satellites that glided silently above the earth at ten thousand miles per hour. Rivers and oceans—the Sargasso Sea—became cemeteries for foolish men whose vision of the future extended no farther than the water’s edge.
‘No comprende ingles,’ the Mexicano said. He looked up at the out-of-breath stranger, sag eyed and sweaty.
