by Ryan Ireland
The woman screamed out and his father grabbed the woman’s hair and forced her face down into the sand. He continued thrusting at her while her cries were muted in the dust. Her hands scraped at the sand around her face.
‘Papa,’ the boy said quietly. It felt as if he had sand in his throat.
‘Shut it,’ his father said. All the sudden there was respite and his father craned his head back as if examining the sky—but his eyes were closed. The woman sprawled out limp in the powdered earth.
iv
Slopes of the mountain passes became steeper as the man traveled on. The soil bleached out from brown into red and again into a dust like crumbled adobe. Pine trees took over the landscape, their roots webbing across the hard-packed soil. The man’s path eventually took on a certain predestination as he entered a canyoned place. Walls of stone reached up far on either side. Some trees took root in the rock and seemed to spire just to meet the sun.
The man, with his intrepid pace, slept not but a few hours at a time and upon awakening he would gauge either the sun or the stars or the ghostly moon that marked the transitions from day to night and night to day. Then he began to walk.
In the daytime he noted some markings on a reddened rock. The illustrations appeared to be that of a child. He took pause long enough to study the chalked lithographs. He noticed how hungry he was as he stood still. In a crook in the rock face he spied a bird’s nest. For a long time he stood still, waiting for the bird to return, but it did not. He walked to the nest and looked inside. Two eggs no bigger than his thumb lay in the tangle of sticks and mud. He picked one up, smelled it, then ate it. The viscera leaked out from the crackling shell sweet and frothy. The second egg was not the same. When the man crunched down on the shell, something distinctly meaty squished under his teeth. He kept chewing, the taste of blood flooding his mouth. He swallowed hard, the fleck of eggshell and bits of bone like hair, scraping the length of his esophagus. Then he continued on.
When the native chief and several of his warriors came to the lean-to, the boy and his father did not resist them. The woman still lay face down, her legs spread apart in an unnatural angle, the father’s jizzum leaking out. One of the warriors lifted the woman up over his shoulder. The natives guided the father and son through the forest, through a grove of palms and thicket. The father did not protest; he simply let the natives take him and the son. The boy trembled. He looked to his father, but his father only looked straight ahead.
They walked for some time before coming to a cove. It was a deserted spot on the island, the beach sodden with sandmites and strewn with vine. The chief looked as if he might continue walking, walking right out onto the ocean. He turned and looked at the father and the son. He pointed to a canoe farther on down the beach.
‘You want us to leave?’ the boy asked.
But the chief did not answer, nor did he cast his gaze upon the boy.
‘You aint gonna kill us, is ya?’ the father asked. He sighed and nodded, looked out into the sea.
The warrior went to the canoe and slumped the woman into the boat. Another set their footlocker on the sand. The chief broke his gaze and the native band retreated into the forest, leaving the father and son on the beach. Together and exiled, they inspected their sailing vessel. The canoe was made from the dried trunk of a tree. It had been hulled out through a series of scrapings and burnings. Eventually the trunk formed an oblong bowl, the inside black with carbon from being set aflame.
A knife made from a stone like glass lay next to the woman. The warrior, whether by accident or as a type of courtesy, must have dropped it there. The boy’s father hefted the footlocker into the boat.
‘More supplies than I expected,’ the father said. He grabbed the bow of the boat and began to shove it down the beach toward the surf.
‘But the woman,’ the boy said.
‘Bodys ours now,’ the father said. ‘Think the chief wouldnt take it so kindly if we left her.’ Then the father told his son to get in the boat. The boy did as he was told. Blood dribbled across the bottom of the vessel. ‘Think the point is we’re supposed to take everything with us—leave the place like we was never here,’ he said and launched them into the ocean.
In the twilight hours the stranger arrived at the mine. The trail led him there naturally, taking a course that dipped back across the boundary creek, the thread that sliced the mountains into mirror images of each other over a million years. He stood atop the tailing. Besides an overturned crate, a broken shovel and a few stray bottles, there was little evidence anyone had ever inhabited this place.
A dried pine, naked, its limbs wizened and gnarled, stood by the mouth of the shaft. He postulated that latent amounts of uranium poisoned the tree. He sniffed, walked past the tree and into the shaft.
Wooden uprights and ceiling boards supported the tunnel as it cut straight back into the mountain at a low grade. Keeping his head down, the stranger proceeded into the manmade cave. Instantly the air grew colder, moister. The chiseled path on the floor was made slick with trickles of runoff. The slabbed walls sweated condensation.
He proceeded slowly into the shaft, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness as he went deeper. He stopped and bent down, picked up an object lying stray by the cave wall. It was cylindrical and it sweated too. It smelled bitter, acrid. He carried the dynamite as a man might carry a taper as he descended into total darkness. Along the way he gathered more sticks of the explosive. Down deeper still he found bundles of dynamite held together with twine. He gathered those too, slinging them over his shoulder by their fuse lines.
He stopped, partially because the headroom clearance had dropped considerably, and partially because his load had become cumbersome. He sat on the granite floor. The seat of his trousers soaked through. Whether it was night outside or not no longer mattered; it was night in here.
Five
i
The man came to a place where the pines thinned out and grew even taller. They hugged the cliffsides. The air smelled sweet, like boiled tree sap. It was strange land like he had not seen before. Mountains were cut flat across the top with mats of green blanketing the plateau surface.
From time to time he still felt the presence of the Indians. Feeling their eyes upon him caused the man to move more quickly until he plodded through the pylons of tree trunks. He came to a cliffside and craned his head back. Through the openings in the branches, he could see caverns bored deep into the yellowed stone. Farther up, past the reach of any man, he could see the scribblings of men who had been here decades before. He approached the foot of the cliff and saw a series of footholds. Somewhere distant in the forest he heard a pinecone crumple under foot of something clandestine. He figured it to be an Indian—the one with the hand ax, maybe the one with the suit of bones. Could be the one with the scars over his nipples and the stipples in his nose. He shook his head. No, that place was gone now. He began to climb.
Each foothold and cubby for his hand was well measured and he easily scaled the cliffside right to the cavern opening. He pulled himself inside. For a moment he sat catching his breath and took in his surroundings. A mortar and pestle sat on the floor amongst shards of a broken clay pot. A ragged animal skin lay on the floor. The man lifted the pestle from the mortar. Meal crushed a thousand years ago still piled deep in the bottom. The man ate it. Grit from the crushing stone sifted through his teeth. When he was mostly done he finally looked out across the vista. The sight made him swear out loud. Up here in his cliffside perch the world spread out vast and small.
The ocean appeared much the same way to the boy. He and his father had been adrift a week in the canoe. The meat his father had cut from the woman’s legs and dried on the broad side of the knife ran out a day ago. They had both tried to eat the leg meat as if it was jerky. Each of them nibbled on the flesh, then vomited. Her body had since spoiled and bloated. His father stripped the corpse of what little she still wore. Because the canoe was so narrow and unevenly weighted the boy and his fat
her could not simply dump the woman’s body overboard as they would have on the ship. Such an action could cause them to capsize. For six nights they wallowed in her blood, smelled her rot. Maggots began to hatch in her sore spots.
‘Damn island injuns,’ his father said. ‘Put this whore in here with us just so we’d have to deal with the flies.’
The boy looked out over the plaintive waters, trying to ignore what was happening right there inside the canoe. His father took the stone knife and wedged it under the woman’s arm.
‘Help if you hold her wrist down,’ the father said. But the boy made no move to touch the woman. ‘It’d help me get the blade tween the bones there.’
The boy did not move. His father readjusted his posture until he had a foot on the woman’s hand. He cleaved the blade back and forth until the bone splintered and flecks of blood splattered on the boy. The father took the arm and tossed it into the water. ‘Wouldnt of gotten you soiled like that had you helped me,’ he said.
In the evening, as the stars began speckling the sky, the father heaved the torso from the vessel. The canoe rocked back and forth violently. The boy’s father sorted through the footlocker. He began to speak to the boy, but thought better of it and muttered to himself as he rummaged through the maps and sails. The boy had already settled into the bottom of the boat where he slumbered.
When he awoke his father was still awake. If he had slept, the boy did not know. He did not ask. Instead he asked his father what he was doing.
‘Making a sail,’ his father said. Indeed he busied himself by taking one of the smaller sails from the footlocker and cut it down with the knife. ‘Cuttin the cloth like this.’ His father set down the knife and formed his fingers to make a triangle. ‘Gonna make a rope of sorts out of our clothes and tie it to the top there, run the rope back here and I’ll hold it. You’ll sit up in the bow there and hold down the other two corners.’
‘I’m not strong enough,’ the boy said.
‘Wont have to be,’ the father said. ‘Take your trousers there and tie a leg to each corner. You’ll just have to set on the trousers and not get blown away.’ Then he laughed. He laughed hard enough for the canoe to bounce in the water.
‘You drink the ocean water?’ the boy asked.
His father stopped working. He looked wide-eyed at his boy. ‘Did you?’
‘No.’
‘Why you ask?’
The boy’s brow wrinkled. ‘You laughed,’ he said. ‘Aint never heard you laugh.’
ii
As the stranger lay amongst his dynamite and the nitroglycerine soaked into his skin, he thought of the future. He thought how he would lie here in state for a decade or more, the climate of the shafts preserving most everything except his flesh. How the earthquake would bury him. How the dynamite would continue to age like gourmet cheese and grow sharper, more volatile. Most people spend their energies trying to go from one place to another. It was a trifle, this life. Time moves everything if you wait long enough. Our lives are usually just too short to wait out the universe.
But in here, unlike men, the stranger had time. Universes would intersect here, he knew. In the meantime, he would tell himself bedtime stories, replaying the defining moments of this world as he knew them.
He fell into a type of coma thinking of the boy and his father. He thought about how they stripped naked, shredding their clothes and tying them into rope. Then the boy’s father said they needed to shit. In unison they sat on opposite edges of the boat facing each other, shitting into the ocean. The boy bled some and the father watched.
Then, without a word to one another, the father wrapped his portion of the rope under his arms, his son sat on the trousers to hold down the bottom of the sail. Though the cloth hardly functioned as a proper sail, it provided them some propulsion, an almost vertical lift.
‘We must be caught in a current a some type,’ his father said. The boy had been awake, but kept his eyes shut. ‘Wont be long.’
And the father had been right. The stranger thought of when they spotted land, saw a boat sitting moored in a harbor. A boat flying a pennant flag. He thought of the promise they both saw in a bird, a sprig clamped in its beak, long before the land and ships came into view. Both the father and his boy hooted, called out in nonsense verse, waved their arms. The canoe nearly capsized.
When they arrived a group of men—longshoremen—gathered at the end of the dock. They tossed a rope out to the canoe. Most of the longshoremen turned away, for the father and son were both naked and stained with blood and feces, dried charcoal from the interior of the boat.
‘Good Christ,’ one man said. He touched his forehead, his gut, then each shoulder.
‘D’où êtes-vous?’ another asked.
‘Where are we?’ the father asked.
‘Port of Tobacco,’ one man said.
‘Wheres that?’
A protracted silence followed the father’s inquiry. Then one man answered, said this was America.
The man took to exploring the cavern dwellings of the cliffside. Most everything was connected in one fashion or another. Handholds and footholds led from one apartment dwelling to the next. The caves looked to be bored into the cliff through natural means. Sometimes a crawlway made passage between two apartments and the man recognized these as chiseled by human hands.
Nonsense script adorned the walls, smoke stains plaqued the ceilings. Every once in a while the man came across a rock worn down by usage into a tool of some type. It was quiet in here—he could hear no one following him, tracking his progress to Fort James.
At night he continued worming his way through the apartments, emerging now and again to scale the cliffside laterally by means of hand and footholds. He found a hole toward the rear of an apartment. The opening was lined with mud bricks and the man knew this path was one constructed by whoever dwelled here ages before he came here. He crawled in.
The darkness was instantaneous: no moonlight could navigate the angles needed to illuminate his way. He slurked forward, stomach grating on the grit and stone floor, reaching one hand out in front of him, groping at nothing. On his face he felt a rush of cool air. He pulled himself forward, prying at the cracks in the stone with his toes. Suddenly there was nothing beneath him and he tumbled downward.
To the stranger, the events of the man’s life unfolded as if they happened right before his eyes. As he lay in wait he saw what happened as if this were his own life. He slept with the man, ate with the man. He saw the bits of the man’s life that lapsed with memory—moments the man distorted and blocked. He was with the man when he and his father were jailed in Port of Tobacco, taken by the longshoremen into town.
‘Not that we dont trust ya,’ one said. ‘Just that you look crazy as a loon.’
‘And that injun boat of yers,’ another said.
The Frenchman agreed, saying, ‘Oui.’
The boy and his father, surrounded by the dock workers, walked the dirt road into the town. A well-established place, Port of Tobacco had several buildings cobbled together with stones and mortar.
A man with an apron stood in the door of a squat structure. ‘The hell is this?’ he barked.
‘Castaways.’
‘Came in on a nigger’s boat.’
‘Dont look like injuns.’
‘Caint never be too certain.’
They laughed and pushed the father and son forward.
They were kept in a root cellar below a medicine shop—a space with no greater height than the deepest hull of a ship. The father and son were given clothes, though only a set each. Two buckets were provided for them: one for their refuse, the other with fresh water. Twice daily a man flopped open the hatch to the cellar and swapped out the buckets.
‘What you gonna do to us?’ the father asked.
But their visitor wouldnt look him in the eyes. On the planked floor above, the boy could see the boots of several other men standing, watching, listening.
‘Could use some more bread,�
�� the father said. ‘My son and me—we been out at sea for a piece, nearly starved.’
The man climbed back up the stairs and the hatch shut. The boy could hear the wooden bolt sliding in place. Light came in only through the fissures and knotholes in the floor.
‘Aint as sunny as that island,’ the father said.
But the boy did not answer. He listened to the muted voices of the men above conversing with one another.
‘Least theys white men, people like us,’ the father said.
Then the boy told him that nobody was like them. ‘Thats why we’re here,’ he said. ‘They aint never seen people like us.’
The father knew this was true. At sea theyd met lots of men of different types. They traded with those to whom they could relate—if they had a man aboard speaking in the native tongue, if the customs one displayed were that of decipherable measure. But those who were nothing but foreign to them—they killed them without hesitation. This boy and his father, they shared no commonality with these people.
The man woke inside a brick structure. The hole he had pulled himself through punctured the rock wall and the sun shined through a square window. The top of the structure did not have a roof. Instead a stone ceiling seemed to suspend over the whole of the building without any support.
He sat up. A gash ran the length of his forearm and oozed with purpled blood. He made a fist and pain raced up his arm and burned like venom. His body ached. He limped from the structure to investigate his surroundings.
There are times in the human mind when things are so unfamiliar that the brain simply does not let the eyes see. Little bits of the information are edited down into fractured granules of information—single frame photos, a single exchange of words. We construct the rest around what we think to remember.
So it was with the man. He walked around the village of ancient roofless bricked buildings. A great expanse of stone stretched over the entire village. The alcove in the mesa opened up into a flat-bottomed canyon filled with scrub and brush. Other mesas cropped up somewhere between here and the distant jagged mountainscape. Whoever inhabited this place recognized the natural opening as a place for shelter—a place to house an entire village. The man walked the narrow alleys between the buildings, his eyes darting from one window to the next. But nothing moved. He was the only one about. Artifacts from those who lived here littered the ground, sat dusty in some forgotten corner of a squared adobe brick building. The cave dwellings on the adjacent side of the mesa must be growths from this place, the man determined. Toward the back of the alcove, where the ground met the roof of the cave, the rock slicked with water. He put his mouth to the stone, his lips scraping against the lichen. The water tasted of the earth. He stayed in place—an awkward position like a penitent man genuflecting before his judge—licking at the rock. When he had his fill, he sauntered back through the abandoned village. Once he arrived at the mouth of the cave, he sat with his legs dangling over the cliffside. The sun now slanted at such an angle that he could sit in the light. Come evening the alcove, the village, would be bathed in the fiery splendor of a dying sun. For now the sun stayed high in the sky, weltering down on the alien place without pity for those who did not have the shelter of the cliff dwellings.
