by Ryan Ireland
Teachings from the elders of his tribe allowed for another life beyond this one, but in another form. And to all appearances, he was still the same Indian boy. Whatever spirits were at play here, they did not abide by the laws of men.
The ground rumbled some and the boy widened his stance. He looked to each side, waiting for a stampede of animals to crest the horizon. The rumbling grew, yet nothing appeared in any direction. A wisp of steam came from the hole he’d just struggled out of. Timidly, he leaned forward to peer down into it. Then a bigger plume of steam belched out and it stung the Indian boy’s eyes. He fell. The ground surged with tremendous force and he clamored backward. A geyser shot up into the air, hissing as it went. Whatever place the Indian boy had come to, it was primal and struggling still to take shape.
The man was shown to a room the lieutenant called a parlor. Chairs like the man had never seen—leather so shiny it reflected the lampglow—sat on a bearskin rug.
‘Commandante wants his visitors waitin out here for him,’ the soldier said. ‘He’ll a-call you when hes ready.’ He promptly left the room.
The man stood awkwardly in the center of the room, unsure of what he should do. The walls themselves were the only things resembling the rough-hewn look of the rest of the fort. He touched one of the bricks and it crumbled into the man’s fingers. He sifted the grains of dirt. Then, in the dampened light he examined a larger chunk of the brick. It felt like a tooth. He shook his head at the thought.
He hesitated, then sat in one of the leather chairs. He’d never felt something so soft. It wrapped around his body, seeming to hold him like a woman. Naturally, he thought of his own woman. He thought how this was it—he would legitimize her and the child, bring them into existence during this very meeting. He closed his eyes. Few times had he felt a peace in his life this deep. The last time he could recall was in leaving Port of Tobacco, the footlocker and some rations the only cargo in his newly purchased wagon. He set off, north and west—more west than north. He glanced only once over his shoulder and watched as the glimmer of the ocean ebbed out of view and the land of grasses swelled around him. If any traces of his past life remained, they were bones and timber lost to the sea.
Like the pilgrims and zealots, the exiled mormons, the sooners and Okies who would descend on this place in incremental fashion as if Moses himself declared they would come, the man made his way into a land void of promise.
As he suspected, the two men returned with greater numbers. The stranger was ready for them. He stood at the entrance road to the village, his feet spaced a shoulderwidth apart, his hands clasped behind his back. Most of the men approached on horseback. A few wagons toted cargo. All the men were dressed in blue. A man in the front raised a hand to signal the company to halt. Another man on horseback trotted up next to the commander. They conversed, taking turns pointing to the stranger. Several of the subordinates passed around a canteen. Everyone studied the stranger. Finally the two men—the commander and his lieutenant—rode forward.
‘Howdy there,’ one said as they came within speaking distance.
The stranger returned the greeting.
‘Couple of scouts saw this village here,’ the commander said. ‘Maps dont show any such place.’
The stranger nodded, said yessir.
‘Mind if we ask what this here place is?’ the lieutenant asked.
The stranger feigned surprise by raising his eyebrows. ‘This here place,’ he said, emulating the man’s speech, ‘is Fort James.’
‘Fort James?’
The commander said he’d never heard of it.
‘My job was to ready the fort for inhabitation,’ the stranger said. He stood as a soldier for inspection.
The commander leaned forward on his horse and glanced over the plain blue uniform of the stranger. It was devoid of insignia and rank. But it was remarkably clean. ‘Your job?’ the commander said. He clarified: ‘And what is your position here at Fort James exactly?’
The stranger turned his head and smiled so his teeth showed. ‘Well, sir, I’m this here fort’s goddamn commandante.’
iii
The young man drove the wagon across the plains, navigating as he knew best. He drove the wagon during the night, guided by the stars. In the daytime, he crawled under the carriage of the wagon and slept. If the night grew too brisk, he might take some of the sailcloth from the footlocker and drape it over the wagontop to make a tent. Though food was scarce, he did well enough for himself catching small game and scavenging the rare fruit or patch of tubers. Should he catch a mouse, he would use it to bait a hawk, then kill the predator bird with a sling. Occasionally he went a couple days without food before happening upon something to sustain himself. There were no rivers to speak of, just mere trickles. He had a talent for living that few people have ever possessed, especially now.
In all his life he had never been alone. As he rode, he tried to recall a time when he could find no trace of another person. He could think of none. There had always been someone’s voice, his father’s presence. It struck him as odd—him in this vast place all by himself. The world is so big, the young man knew. He’d sailed half of it, seen more than most old men had ever seen. Yet this was the first place unaffected by people. He wondered how long it might be before this place he traversed became infected with people. He wondered if there were places human eyes had never seen.
‘Come,’ a voice called from the office.
The man opened his eyes, his reminiscences interrupted by the instruction. The door to the interior office from the parlor was ajar. He entered.
The commandante stood behind a large wooden desk, the top stained and lacquered. He shuffled papers into a stack. His hair was white, pulled back into a ponytail. The hair on his face was also mostly white, though a grey streak ran down from his lower lip. The man did not recognize the aged commandante as the stranger.
‘Sit down,’ the commandante said. He continued to busy himself, then eventually sat. The man looked around the office. In all his life, in all the places he traveled, he had never seen a place so polished and new. What parts of the desk were not hidden by paperwork had designs inlaid. A set of fully stocked bookshelves with glass doors covered the wall behind the commandante. And the old military officer, despite his age, looked fresh—his uniform dark blue and creased.
The man’s observations did not go unacknowledged. ‘Made a nice place for myself here,’ the commandante said. ‘Took some time, some patience and planning, but I made this place my own.’
‘Looks to be the nicest place I ever been in,’ the man said.
‘Probably true,’ the commandante chuckled. ‘This could be the apex of your existence.’ The man faked amusement at the comment, though he didnt know what the commandante meant. After the chortles died, there was a silence.
‘Youre not from around here,’ the commandante said.
‘No sir, caint say I am.’
‘From out on the plains?’
‘Thats right.’
‘Come in for the census?’
The man seemed to exhale for the first time in quite a while. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Thats why I’m here. Need to register my family.’
The commandante stood and turned to the bookcase. From a lanyard around his neck, he took a skeleton key and opened one of the glass doors. He pulled an oversized book off the shelf and set it with a thump on the desk. ‘Be happy to register your family,’ the commandante said. ‘But first I want you to tell me about the Indians you saw.’
The man stared at the great book, several swathes of parchment thick, the commandante’s hand resting lightly on top of it as if he were about to swear an oath of truth. ‘Only saw three or four of them,’ he said. ‘One was on a horse—white horse like I never seen. He wore this outfit all made of bones.’ The commandante nodded knowingly. ‘They done follered me a long ways—since I first come into the mountains. They had a couple chances to kill me, but they never did.’ Then the man asked if these Indians
might not be the murdering kind.
‘Didnt know there was another kind,’ the commandante said. ‘And from what I know of them, this one in the bone armor could be the end of us all.’
‘One injun?’
The simplicity of the question amused the commandante. He held up an index finger, then took another key from his breast pocket. He opened a desk drawer and took out an oblong box with a small padlock on it. He used another key to open the box. ‘Got to keep this one quiet,’ he said. ‘Call this Pandora’s box. You know Pandora’s box?’
The man shook his head, said he didnt.
The commandante smiled, said Pandora was the name of the place out east of here. ‘Place where I purchased this. Names Greek in origin, I believe.’
‘Oh.’
For a moment the commandante sat with his shoulders quaking in suppressed laughter. ‘Forgive me,’ he finally said. ‘Cant take it back now.’ The box opened with a click and he lifted the lid. Inside a cloth was wrapped over something. He lifted it from the box and set it on the table. Then he unwrapped the revolver. ‘Know what this is?’
The man said he didnt rightly know, looked to be some type of tool.
‘Indeed,’ the commandante said. ‘It’s a tool for building empires. This here is a revolver, a sort of gun.’
‘I know about guns.’
‘Ever seen one this close?’
‘Caint say I have.’
The commandante opened the chamber and exposed the hollow spaces where bullets were stored for use. ‘This is the most efficient way to kill men,’ he said. ‘You can take this gun, load it with six shots, kill six men. Give a man a belt with two of these on it and hes his own damn army.’
‘Dont reckon that injuns got a gun,’ the man said.
‘I wouldnt think so,’ the commandante said. ‘Most men alive right now will never see a gun. Someday people will think differently. They’ll tell stories of the old west and gunslingers, showdowns and shootouts.’
The man’s brow furrowed. ‘Why’d they do a fool thing like that? If we aint got guns, why’d anyone tell a story like that?’
The commandante smiled like he’d led the man to ask the question. ‘Because they will have guns. Children will have guns for play, our heroes will carry guns. And us—the history of the future—we will be assigned our stories based on the present.’
‘You done got me thinkin in circles, sir.’
‘Best you do since everything tends to be cyclical.’
The man didnt bother to ask the meaning of that statement. ‘So you gonna go out and kill that injun with the gun?’
The mere suggestion seemed off-putting to the commandante. ‘No,’ he frowned. ‘Thing with a gun is you cant take it back. All I do is press a trigger. Then, somewhere farther off, through a different chain of events, the bullet collides with a body. Once that bullet is out of the chamber, the path it’s on is already set. If you think this place is hard country now, fire this gun off in the public square. Watch what this place will turn into.’
‘So how you gonna get rid of them injuns?’
The commandante leaned back in his chair as if pondering the statement in some philosophical fashion. ‘Figure I’ll ride out there and smash their skulls with a rock.’ The man wanted to react, but he sat inert before the military officer. ‘Someday people will call it cruel—the way we dispense with life. By that time we’ll have mortars that can traverse an ocean. A gun could hold a thousand bullets and pump them out in a minute’s time. We’ll have bombs to level cities. Killing will be tidy. Industry usually streamlines itself. But right now we have to make do with what we have. I could take a strapping from an old wagon wheel and pound it into a blade, slice open a human head with it, you know.’
The man tried to decipher what the commandante said, but it might as well have been spoken in another language altogether. He took a moment to collect his thoughts. He studied the officer, realizing that a man like him didnt make it to old age without cutting others’ lives short. He needed the commandante for protection.
‘Can we talk bout registerin my family now?’
The Indian boy wandered through places without borders or names. If there was a division between man and beast, he did not see it. What life there was milled about, nearly blind, covered in vellus hair, grunting and snorting. At first these beasts gave the Indian boy cause to worry; he had never seen anything like this before. Then he realized the animals were harmless, too dumb to inflict any harm. They rooted in the swamps and bogs, digging out mudfish. Some of the swamps boiled, sending dollops of steamy mud into the air. The beasts, dumb as they were, might wade into the bog. Feeling the intense heat they began shrieking. Flooded with some rudimentary chemical resembling adrenaline they would begin thrashing, usually sinking them deeper into the hot muck. The other beasts upon hearing the shrieks began to panic themselves and they too might run into the bog.
Plants, those scrag things that held too little promise in his past life, were alien things blooming with giant flora. Insects as big as his hands and feet scuttled to and from the plants, feasting on pollens and nibbling at the leaves. The boy took a stick and chewed it into a point. He used it as a spear and stabbed a beetle through the back. Its legs kept moving as if nothing happened. Its wings, now pinned by the stick, attempted to flutter. The serrated pinchers at its mouth opened and closed rhythmically. All this the boy observed before taking the beetle to the edge of a bog and turning it on the stick over the steam. The steam made the exoskeleton of the bug easier to crack. He pulled the meat—if it could be called that—from the creature’s thorax.
At night he lay naked on a rock in a darkness greater than any known to any human who has ever lived. He did not dream; he simply slept and awakened. When you are a stranger to a familiar world, even the imagination cannot manufacture an escape.
iv
The commander remarked that the stranger had made quite a place for himself. ‘How’d you manage?’ he asked.
‘I enslaved an entire generation of Indians,’ the stranger replied. Both men laughed heartily. They sat at a table in the cantina. The soldiers, tired from their trek, bunked at the garrison inside the fort. The two men passed a bottle of amber liquid back and forth.
The commander belched, letting his cheeks balloon when he did so. ‘I gotta say this is the damnedest place I ever come across.’ The stranger pretended not to understand what the military man meant. He took a light sip from the bottle, then handed it back. ‘You say you got orders to take in my entire company—that we’re gonna be quartered here.’
‘Yessir.’
The commander glugged two fingers’ worth of liquor, smacked his lips. ‘It’s a wonder I ever found this place. Scouts near missed it. And I didnt rightly believe them when they told me bout it.’
‘Hard to imagine a place like Fort James,’ the stranger conceded.
The commander stood, swayed a little until he regained his balance, then sauntered over to the window looking out into the street. ‘Dont know what to make of all this,’ he said.
Again the stranger feigned ignorance, said he didnt know what the commander meant.
‘Left out of Santa Fe near about four months ago,’ he said. He still looked out the window, slid his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Left there with close to three hundred men, six months of supplies. We were scheduled to arrive in Denver within three months.’
‘But you got attacked by some Apache.’
Slowly the commander turned around to look at the stranger seated at the table. ‘Yeah. The Apache, a whole horde of em. Ever single one of em swingin a club or an ax, fighting like dogs. Saw one nigger bite right through one of my men’s necks.’
The stranger whistled.
‘Couldnt tell my men what to do. They all just tryin to stay alive. Cant call no retreat cause we aint got nowhere to go.’
The stranger chuckled and took another sip from the bottle, said that type of situation is bound to happen when youre in a land th
at isnt yours. ‘But thats why we got this here fort now.’
The commander leaned against the window frame. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Fort James is a place to guard against the Indians,’ the stranger explained. ‘My job is to take in the troops that need shelter. This land is rough. Its inhabitants are rougher. This fort’s job is to take in anyone who didnt originally live here.’
For a moment it looked as if the commander had fallen asleep standing up—his eyes were deadened with the weight of alcohol. ‘When we met, out there at the edge of town, you told me what you were,’ he said. As he had been doing, the stranger looked beguiled by the statement. ‘You said you were this fort’s something.’
‘Commandante.’
‘Thats it,’ the commander said. ‘Aint no rank I heard of in the American military. Who you say you get your orders from?’
‘From the top,’ the stranger said. ‘The Commander in Chief, you might say.’
The commander stood a long time studying the stranger. ‘And what does a commandante do?’ he asked.
The stranger shrugged, said the job was a bit open-ended. ‘You can say I am in charge of the fort itself.’
This made the commander stand up straight as if he was called to attention. ‘I’m the ranking officer in the company,’ he balked.
‘Certainly,’ the stranger agreed. ‘The company—all those men—are yours. Fort James is my responsibility.’
‘The buildings?’
‘The whole place.’
‘Except the men.’
‘The men are yours.’
The commander nodded—more to himself than in agreement. ‘Alright then,’ he said. ‘You take care of this place and I’ll look after everything military.’
The stranger took a swig from the bottle and handed it to the commander. ‘Good way to do it.’
The young man’s wagon trundled on during the day. In his quest to go ever deeper into the unknown country, he had forsaken sleep. He rode through the night and back into the daytime, alternating his methods of navigation: first using the scattered lights of the stars; then following the concentrated glowering of the sun. At times he fell into momentary slumber, the reins wrapped around his wrists so as not to lose control of the wagon altogether. Every once in a while he awakened to find his mule stopped and eating a tuft of grass. He rubbed the crust from the corners of his eyes and stood in the bed of the wagon. Slowly, he turned to look around him. Spread out in every direction there was nothing—not a tree or river, a building to speak of. There were no green and white signs with reflective lettering telling him it was two hundred and fifty miles to Tulsa, a hundred-fifty-mile straight shot on Old 40 to Amarillo. If he waited and held his breath, there was no sound. When the wind blew it did not make a noise, for there was nothing to obstruct it and make it call out like the chopped cries of a propeller pulling an aircraft across the skies.
