by Ryan Ireland
It was in the middle of this memory that the men in the mine struck the stranger’s dynamite and blew him back into existence and buried themselves alive.
The man tried to open his eyes, but found it too difficult. The weight on his chest made breathing a chore enough. He parted his mouth and inhaled, but loose granules of dirt flooded his mouth. He coughed and pain shot through his ribs, seemed to stab at his backbone. For a few moments he concentrated solely on breathing—inhaling through his nose, though one nostril was packed with dirt, and exhaling through his mouth. After a few breaths he moved his arms. He had some mobility. With all the strength he had left he shoved at the weight on his chest and felt it give way. He kicked his feet and freed himself from the immediate imprisonment.
It was completely dark. In this darkness, the quiet of this place, the man wondered if he had died. Having never pondered what comes after death, this seemed plausible enough. Those who die become subducted into the earth. But how doubtful we are when it comes to a life after this one. As he lay contemplating his death, the man’s hands roved over his body, inspecting the rash of wounds he sustained during the implosion. A gash ran from his shoulder blade to his backbone. The little finger on his left hand was broken. One of his ears was half torn from his head.
He began to crawl. It made no difference whether he was living or dead. Either fate would suffice. Indeed though, the man was alive. Little did he know just exactly where he was in relation to the rest of the world. The labyrinth of tunnels the miners had constructed spread out under the fort like tree roots that have a farther reach than the branches have above ground. At this moment, fifteen hundred feet above him, a wall of the fort, now on unsteady ground, had collapsed, spilling out the loose fill. No more than a thousand feet from there the Indian Chief and three of his tribesmen hunched over the corpse of the commandante. A vengeance that stews over the course of a lifetime is always unfulfilling. Killing the stranger was no different.
The Chief turned to a tribesman and ordered him to cut the commandante’s hands off. Cut up his entire body, the Chief said. Scatter the pieces, cook some pieces and feed others to the vultures. Burn his uniform and hair. Grind his teeth with a mortar until they are nothing but flour. No sooner had he given the command when a tribesman grabbed the Chief by the arm. He pointed out across the dry open ground, past where smoke and dust swirled in dirt devils. A man approached on a vector not from the fort, not from the village in the cliff. He was a ghostly white. The Chief took the dagger from the commandante’s hand and began walking toward this new stranger. The tribesmen followed at a trot.
‘You there!’ the Chief shouted. The man on the horizon kept walking toward him without regard for the Chief’s words. Some soldiers gathered at the fallen portion of the wall and readied themselves. But neither the approaching stranger nor the Indian paid them any mind.
The stranger stepped over a body, sidestepped a pile of burning dung. As he drew nearer, the Chief could see this stranger’s skin was without any color. What clothes he had looked to rot right off his body. The tribesman in the stovepipe hat took off in a sprint toward the stranger, bringing his hatchet over his head. The other tribesmen followed. The stranger—the Chief knew at once that it was him in the flesh—seized the Indian by the wrist and grabbed the hatchet. He brought his elbow into the back of the Indian’s head and used the blunt end of the hatchet to crack the next Indian’s skull. He ducked the spear the third Indian threw and launched the hatchet at the retreating tribesman. The blade buried in the Indian’s back and he fell dead.
Only the Chief was left. The stranger kept approaching; he yanked the hatchet out of the back of the Indian as he passed. The soldiers at the fort watched these figures, small against the backdrop of the desert land and the rubble of the village, obscured by wafts of yellow smoke.
‘Didnt figure on it happening this way,’ the stranger said. He came close enough for the Chief to see the blood veins tracing blue lines through his face. This was him—the stranger of the Chief’s youth. His hair was longer and darker, his skin fairer. The stranger smiled so his teeth showed. ‘How’d it feel to kill me?’
The Chief could not stand any longer; he sat on the ground and stared out past the stranger, past the fort. ‘Felt the same as any other of the million men I killed,’ the Chief finally said.
‘Good to know,’ the stranger said. ‘I figured I would have to be the one to do it when the time came.’ In the short time the stranger had been out of his mine, the sun had taken a toll on his skin, reddening it into blisters, popping and glistening now. ‘Did you follow the man I sent out this way?’
The Chief nodded once, the tincture of the skullcap reflecting the sun overhead.
The stranger said he figured it was so, said time was a cruel thing. ‘Spend a whole lifetime pursuing a thing constructed in your dreams,’ he scoffed. He gestured with his fingers like he was crushing a bug, then opened them up like whatever it was had vanished. ‘Then you find out that the world is… this.’
‘I used to be a much older man,’ the Indian mumbled.
‘Hows that?’
‘I woke from the earth,’ he said. ‘Like I had been buried there. Woke and found the earth a younger place, and me a much older man—shrunk with age.’ He sat hunched, the humerus bones, resting in the femurs. He sighed. ‘I suppose you are going to tell me my time is up,’ he said.
The stranger examined the edge of the ax. ‘I dont decide such things,’ he said.
For a moment, the Indian almost laughed in spite of himself. ‘You didnt decide to throw me—my entire village—into the well?’
The stranger looked over toward the bloodied mess of the commandante’s corpse—his corpse. ‘Commandante there thought he did,’ the stranger said. ‘But Ive had a while to think. Most men dont live in their heads enough to understand the universe like I do.’
This statement did make the Indian laugh. ‘When you cut me up, cut my ears off first.’
The stranger returned the laughter. ‘Suppose it wont make a difference. You’ll be dead here a few minutes. Just thought you’d want to know what the future looks like.’
The Indian laced his fingers together, the boned ones and the ones of flesh all folded around each other. ‘Dont need to know,’ he said. ‘Seen the past clear enough.’
‘Yes,’ the stranger said. ‘Thats how you can tell. Thats how I knew the commandante—that old fool—would die and I would be here now.’
The Indian turned his head to look at the stranger and call him a fool, a charlatan. But the ax came down and severed through the bridge of the Indian’s nose and cleaved a wound wide and deep. Brains spilled out with blood. As if he were still alive, the Indian’s body shook and a puddle of urine flooded the ground around him.
The stranger stood over the body until it stopped writhing. Then he turned about face and walked toward the fallen portion of the wall. The soldiers rankled their blades and shouted in cacophony. At the edge of the spilled fill, the stranger knelt and scooped up a handful of the till, he examined the gravel and sand, the bone meal and teeth. Then he looked up at the soldiers watching him. He dropped the fill and extended his arms. ‘Friends,’ he said. ‘Ive been looking for this place for quite some time.’
ii
As he crawled through the mines, the man tried to calculate his direction best as possible. He reached forward, feeling the ground in front of him, trying to feel if his body had slid over the dirt, if he had passed this way before. He had been crawling for some while now. Hunger growled deep in his gut and he ate a few pinches of dirt to fill the void. He’d slept just as he was crawling, taking care only to sleep in a passage narrow enough that he couldnt turn around while he slumbered.
In the complete dark, he had little room to deviate from whatever he supposed his course was. When he had to shit he pulled down his pants and crapped in the middle of the passage.
He came to the end of a tunnel and the overhead opened enough that he could sit upright
. The obstruction in front of him was a pile of rocks, something wooden too. He figured it to be a collapsed ceiling. Knowing this was an unstable area, the man loosened a rock and waited, listened for the grumblings of another pending cave-in. When there was none, he grunted and rolled the rock aside. In his mind, the man strategized, thinking if he could clear the rocks under the wooden beam, he might be able to make safe passage by using the beam as a support. He spent hours wedging his fingers into the fissures between the stones and clawing them out. Dirt packed in under his fingernails and flakes of the nail began to lift from the finger itself. Twice a stone, loosened by the removal of another stone, fell on the man—the first time on his hand, the second time on his shoulder.
Before the man had burrowed his way through the caved-in portion of the tunnel, he fell asleep. In his dreams, he kissed his woman, grabbed at her breasts. She laughed and held him close to her. A baby, swaddled and cooing, lay in a crib made from a crate. In this dream the woman spoke his language and she told him to stay here with her.
‘Why would I leave?’ the man asked, kissing at her neck and down onto the exposed tops of her breasts.
The voice she spoke in this time was not her own. ‘Because you already have, you son of a whore.’
He looked up into his woman’s eyes and she cried, looking out the door over his shoulder. The man turned and walked out of the hovel. As he walked past the threshold, he realized he held a jawbone, sharpened down into a shank, at ready. He stepped outside and the world was a different place. Giant mammoth buildings blocked out the sun, though one constructed of glass panels reflected it in a mosaic fashion. The ground was flat and hard, scraps of paper, flimsy white cups blew down the streets. The man turned around to look back into the hovel and his abode was on fire.
He awoke with a start and lay in the darkness of the tunnel, gasping for air as if he had been running from something.
The stranger was met with a mixture of distrust and admiration by the survivors of Fort James. For some he was a folk hero—able to vanquish the last of the redskinned niggers; he had killed the ugly cuss with the bone outfit. Some of the soldiers, to save face, dismissed his actions as insignificant. ‘We wouldve killed em when they came after us,’ they said. ‘He was just there first, thats all.’ Still a few more, both soldier and civilian, wondered what he’d said to the Chief. ‘They looked to be friends,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Chattin it up.’ Others rebutted that the end result was the same—a dead nigger and no more injuns.
When he first entered the fort, the soldiers stepped back and let him through the passage. He drank from a trough in the courtyard, asked where all the villagers had gone.
‘Done bin killed by the niggers,’ a soldier said. ‘Few went down into the mines. Few come out, but there was a cave-in and most all them was buried alive.’
The stranger nodded knowingly. ‘Anyone in charge?’
‘That was the commandante—the old soldier.’
‘No one else in line?’
The soldier exchanged glances and shrugs with the other soldiers. ‘Cant say there is.’
‘Then youre free,’ the stranger said. He smiled. ‘You dont have to answer to anyone.’
The lieutenant walked over. ‘Need to stay organized,’ he said. ‘Those Apache niggers is bound to come this way agin.’
The stranger shook his head. ‘Not if there isnt one to tell them to. We killed every last one of them. No need to stay enlisted. This is our place now.’
‘Our place?’ the lieutenant asked. ‘Where’d you come from, stranger?’
A smile, big and toothy, curled the stranger’s lips. ‘Ever had a dream so real you woke up confused?’
The soldier’s brow screwed and he said he supposed he did, least he thought he might have when he was a child.
‘Thats how I woke this morning,’ the stranger said. ‘Dreamt right into existence.’
‘You always talk in riddle?’
iii
Above him the space was vast and endless, stretching out into nothing but a depthless black. The man outstretched his hand and touched the ceiling of soil and rock. He imagined the stars spiraling around the stratosphere, blips of comets and meteorites. He opened and shut his eyes and saw no difference.
He burrowed back into the pile of rocks, a space only wide enough for his torso. Air did not circulate readily as he worked and the space became hot and stuffy, the stink of wet earth and sweat. He backed out by wiggling his hips and pushing with his elbows, taking care not to hit his head against the ceiling above. Once free of the tunnel, he sat up and gasped for air. Even the cave air, stale and mortared, seemed fresh now. After a couple minutes, he sighed and crawled back into the narrow passage. He did this a number of times, even sleeping briefly between digging sprees.
Finally he felt a tumble of stones give way on the other side and his hand stretched out into a void of much cooler air. Though many men’s eyes play tricks on them when there is nothing there, this man thought he saw a wash of light spill through the tiny hole. He dug more feverishly, no longer concerned about breathing with the channel now properly vented.
Soon he had scooped and pushed enough of the earth aside that he could fit through. He pulled the lower half of his body, confined by the narrowness of the passageway, by walking forward on his hands. Pressure from the tunnel he’d dug seemed to be pressing down on his legs. He kicked. Some stones rattled and fell. He pulled himself free and listened to the thump of the tunnel falling in on itself. A mist of dirt rushed through the air, covering the man in a fresh and even layer of grit. Still, he lay gasping on the floor of the mine. Dirt stuck to his teeth and gummed up his tongue. He used the back of his hands to rub the sediment from his eyes. But it was to no avail; his hands were too dirty. He blinked rapidly.
Yes, there was a difference now—something not easily distinguished: there was light in here. Not much, but light, in the way it can find the most desolate corners of the world, had found this place. Though it was much cooler in this section of the mine, the man thought it to be much warmer. He laughed out loud and it echoed in the stone corridors. Then he called out for help, asked if there was anyone who could hear him. He waited for a reply after the echo and its many iterations had faded into nothing.
He stood, one hand over his head in case the ceiling was too low. He straightened up tall and realized this was the main shaft, the only one with a height great enough to accommodate the average miner. For a moment, he tried to figure out how this was possible. He and the other miners had gone into the farthest recesses of the tunnels to make their way into the old mine the cripple had found. Surely there was no shorter way to go. The man called it quits and began staggering toward the source of the light. He imagined it must be a short ways ahead.
The office of the commandante remained untouched. While the survivors of what was now called the Injun massacre looted the homes of the dead and burned the bodies in pyres, they did not disturb the officers’ quarters. Not a single soldier so much as thought to step foot inside the commandante’s office. Perhaps it was superstition. The stranger knew where the quarters was located. His first night in the fort, when he slept in the bunkhouse, in the very same bed the man had occupied just a day before, he fell to sleep examining the ceiling. The wood was darkened a bit. Any layman could tell it was a water stain. The stranger looked at the stain, at the swirled grains of the wood, the warp and weft. He examined the head of a nail popping out from where the beam and slat met. Then he closed his eyes and followed the trajectory of the nail, how it held fast into the wood, held in by forces of friction. Beyond here was the roof, a tin roof rusted through in spots by the rain which came only in short spurts, the dust snow of winter lasting much longer. When the snows melted, they trickled off the low edge, pooled in the divots and ate at the metal.
From this one point in time and space, he calculated what the entire rest of the fort looked like. He could see the foyer of the office with its great leather chairs and bearskin r
ug. In his mind he saw the shape and make of the desk, each drawer. He traveled into the keyhole and saw the pins and tumblers within, knew how to unlock the contents inside. The glass cabinets with their brass knobs where the books were stored. Each book with its own story. Instantly he knew every word, he knew the characters and where they came from in the author’s life, when and where the writer sat when these things first spawned into existence.
But there was one book that, as the stranger lay thinking about it, caused a dark spot in his mind. Whatever this book contained, it was not a story, nor words. No, this was something different. He resolved to explore it in the morning.
He shifted in the bed, in the spot the man had worn in the mattress. It caused him to wonder about the man. He tried to postulate the man’s location. Like all the other civilians of the fort, the man had gone down into the mines. That much the stranger knew. Again he interpolated what the world looked like. The darkest corners of the manmade caves were illuminated in his mind. He could easily see each crevice, every fold in the stone. Then he came to a place where the laws of geology and physics broke down, where he could not imagine what lay there. The limits of the expanded mind are still confined to this world; the worlds we imagine beyond this one are built from the bones and waste of the places we’ve already used.
The stranger sat up and looked around the bunkhouse. Some men murmured in their sleep. Some simply just dreamt. At the far end of the house a pan with a twisted rag as a wick burned melted fat. The stranger pulled on his boots and went out into the night.
iv
The door of the commandante’s office had been left unlocked, the things inside untouched. For as long as any one of them could remember, the commandante had been there. He existed before anyone ever came upon Fort James. Even though they saw him killed, saw his body cut into pieces and burned, the soldiers who worked under him refused to believe he was dead.
