Inland

by Téa Obreht

  We joined forces thereafter with distant Mattie cousins, Avery and Mathers Bennett: dull, happy-cabbage boys from Tennessee. They had more muscle than sense, but Donovan reasoned that two Matties hardly made a gang. With four we could knock over a waystation. We could even knock over a packtrain—and we did, pouring in amongst the wagons in the dark, so the screams lit up like candles around us.

  Knocking over a stagecoach in Fordham one night, we ducked an errant pistol-shot from an overbold New York kid. His second try winged Donovan’s shoulder. Next thing I knew, I had the kid by the hair and halfway out the cab and the others weren’t even stopping me. Newspapers two counties over called it “savagery.” It must’ve been, though I hardly remember anything save wiping my boots after and wondering when I’d started the kicking.

  The next poster said:

  Wanted:

  The Mattie Gang

  Contact Marshal John Berger, Peyton County

  “Well, goddamn,” Donovan said, with no dearth of pride. “You got the marshals after us now. This is worth celebrating.”

  My heart was all sour, but celebrate we did. At a bonfire in our honor, I met eyes with a dark-haired girl whose name escapes me now—if I ever knew it at all.

  She knew mine, though. Sat right up out of my arms when she heard it later on in the barn. “You the Turk that rides with Donovan Mattie.”

  “I ain’t any sort of Turk.”

  “People say that New York boy you beat mightn’t live.”

  “Boy?” I said. “He was a man. He wore a suit.”

  That Donovan was my brother, had saved my life just about every day since he tipped back my hat to study my sorry carcass coming through his door, seemed not to make any difference to her. She climbed down out the loft, and I was left half the night in a heave of terror, alone and missing Hobb almost more than I could bear.

  Later that week Donovan led us all into town to get a look at Marshal Berger’s posse mounting up to hunt us. The Marshal seemed, even then, older than his years, his brow like a newly turned field. He had a naked upper lip three shades lighter than the rest of his face, and we could tell he was regretful of shaving his mustache by the way he kept covering his mouth with his hand. Donovan and me and the Bennett brothers ranged ourselves in back of the crowd and clapped at the speech he made about the ills of sheltering outlaws.

  “These ain’t good boys,” was his gist. “They’re badmen. Rough as hell. You’re doing evil to hide them. Ask yourselves if it’s bread and shelter you’d be giving them, were it your kid done for like the New York boy: every rib broke and one eye gone and his teeth kicked down his throat.”

  I remember wondering what the New York kid’s want would be, if he should happen to die and find me. Would he bind me up in the sorrows of all the things he hadn’t lived to do? Or press in on me till I gave myself up to the Marshal? Or avenge his death by sending me to my own?

  Marshal Berger went on staring out at all our sun-reddened faces. At least half the crowd knew us by sight, but it was Lewis Riffles, the miller’s idiot son, who broke silence. “You sure you got good pictures of the Mattie gang? You sure about they height, they weight? Couldn’t they be anybody? Couldn’t they be right here among us?”

  Smiling all the while, Lewis Riffles, and growing brasher with each syllable till titters shot across the square, from one end to the other.

  The Marshal stood looking into his own shadow in the dirt, and answered wearily, “Yeah, we got good pictures. Yeah, I reckon they could be among us now.” When he’d had enough play, he came down the stairs and took Lewis Riffles by the ear and dragged him to his knees. “All right, all right,” Lewis was saying, but anyone could’ve told you it was too late, his ear a whitening bud vised between the Marshal’s fingers. Suddenly he got to squealing and thrashing, and right there in front of us the whole lobe rent off in one long strip, and a bit of red sideburn with it. The Marshal stood over poor Lewis, who lay in the dirt, face-to-face with his ear-bits all dusted as if for a fry-up. Berger said: “Any man stands between me and one of them Mattie animals, I’ll do him this way and worse.”

  He tried hard for us in one ambush after another all year long, as if he didn’t know the whole county was holding out on him on account of that broken, earless Riffles kid. They hid us in their henhouses and cellars. They passed us off as kith and kin. Whenever we managed another escape, I thought it must be Hobb, somehow, looking out for us from wherever he was when he wasn’t stinging my fingertips. A bit of miracle every day, sent by our little brother, who only wanted us home and settled.

  But then at last came the evening when Donovan’s temper finally played out, and the cab of a Butterfield stage we were holding up filled with brief thunder and the blue light of his sixgun. A scream erupted in all that confusion, and followed us all the way back to town.

  It’s funny how you can dance with a certain line, back and forth, for years—but once you’re over it, you’re over completely and for good. A man can get away with a lot in Arkansas, but not blowing a magistrate’s brains out all over his little daughter’s lap. That particular misstep earned us a handbill stuck to the barn-door:

  Wanted for the Murders of

  James Pearson of New York

  &

  The Honorable Magistrate Colin Phillips of Arkansas:

  Donovan Michael Mattie, of Missouri

  &

  His Small Hirsute Levantine

  “Fuck,” Donovan said. “That New York kid up and died after all!”

  I was in a dread I hadn’t felt since my grave-robbing days. “Why’d they go on like that about the way I look?”

  “Because being a weird little monkey, you’re easiest to peg.” This from Mathers Bennett, who himself had been born looking like a walleyed carrot. “I say we give you over, Lurie. We’re an easy fucking make with you tailing us around.”

  Donovan told him there’d be none of that. Come evening, he’d shaved my hair down till I was bald as a cane rattler. I looked like one of them madmen that the Jesuits were always leading around.

  “But not like any hirsute Levantine, at least,” Donovan said.

  We rode into the hill country. Split up to blur our trail and slept fitfully in the ditches. Overhead the black trees went creaking and groaning. Sometimes, we passed days without seeing one another. Sometimes Berger’s men got close, and the woods filled with the red twilight of their torches.

  Well, Mathers caught typhus in a Greybank whorehouse. We emptied our pockets to bribe the madam to keep him hid till he was well again, but she didn’t wait two days before giving him up to the Marshal. Mathers hanged without trial, of course, right there off a Greybank beam. We heard about it from a newspaperman in Drury City, who went on to talk about Mathers’s last words—a prayer for the cause—and steadfast refusal to give up his accomplices. “I’m a loyal fella,” was the gist. “And Matties is my blood. But with them rides, so help me God, a rough little killer Turk what lately shaved his head to evade the law. He goes by Lurie, and though kicking that New York kid to death was just about the closest he ever came to any kind of worth, he definitely ain’t a Mattie. Amen.”

  When Donovan heard this, all the life went out of his face. He bade me put my hat on right away. “You know, he ain’t even half-wrong about you.”

  “What do you mean?” I said desperately. I figured he was fixing to tell me I wasn’t a Mattie.

  “Well, you’re a rough little killer Turk all right. And your head is shaved.”

  In the green hills above Texarkana, Berger came close. He had hounds, and a keen eye up a tree who clipped me almost right out the saddle. Donovan washed what mud he could out my shoulder and stitched me up in the dark, but I took fever all the same. He laid me in a ditch and covered me with the saddle blanket and packed me in with hearth-heated rocks. “Goddamn,” he kept saying, with this strange littl
e faraway smile, “but you can’t die when you never even seen the ocean.”

  What a strange thing to say. Was that where we’d been headed all this time? And would that have been my want—to see the ocean? I couldn’t tell. And would it be Donovan I put my want into if I went in the night? I managed to keep myself up on that thought alone almost till morning. But not quite. For when I came round, Donovan was gone. I thought at first it must mean I’d come over the other side—and I remember thinking I didn’t feel much want for any damn thing, and certainly not the ocean, and wasn’t that funny?

  But then I found the bread and water Donovan had left behind for me, and I knew he’d ridden on. I wished I’d been right before: that I’d be dead before he left me. Tracks in the mud where he had ridden quietly away, Hobb’s brother and mine. Nothing to remember him save a crust of bread and this old canteen and my fear.

  I first filled the canteen in Iron Springs, and searched for him there. I searched for him in Greenwood, too. But it was futile dodging around the truth of his appearance, describing him one way here, another there, lest someone recognize me and put together our association. I slept in alleys. I fed in churches where parish priests got after my soul with all the fire of their convictions, as though they knew I was carrying that little thief Hobb around, along with my own sins, and maybe they could nab us both for God.

  I was sitting in a boardinghouse at Miza Ridge when Marshal Berger shambled in with eight men and eased himself into a chair that creaked like it was giving voice to all his own aches. That wily old wolf met the eye of every soul present, and held mine so long I knew he was asking himself how come I looked so familiar. Where did he know me from? I waited till the dance-floor crowd thickened up, and then slipped out a back door and by morning was headed south again.

  I aimed to keep moving till the faces on all the bounty bills were strangers to me. One fishing town after another spread its pale lights before me down the coast. I bedded in skiffs, sea-tossed and wondering what would be worse: drifting oarless beyond the breakwater, or waking to find Marshal John Berger looming over me. River barges south of Matagorda offered steadier lodgings. But the brimful stores of ships’ holds tempted Hobb. His want grew and grew. He wanted after hooks and bells and sailors’ goodluck charms. He closed my hand around coins and boot buckles. His rage, whenever I traded his trinkets for meals, was feverish. For all the weighted jangling of my coat pockets, he thought us empty.

  On I went, south along the bays. This succession of weeks, of raggedy people fishing the shallows and squalls loosing streams of black rain, might have continued if, in the spring of what must have been 1856, by the light of a burning sunset, I hadn’t climbed the rope ladder of a creaky full-rig with a swordfish prow berthed at the longdock in Indianola. The wind was rising and a final green blaze narrowing out above the waves. I have since wondered whether I remember it so clear because I somehow knew it would be worth remembering, or whether the intervening years have given my memories a sheen of Providence.

  Whatever the case, seeing the deck deserted, Hobb got his hooks into me. I searched bivvies and saddlebags for something to quiet him. He didn’t want the strange coffee cup I first laid my hand to, nor a silver bridle. No: what he wanted was a glass bead, deepwater blue, painted up with a dizziness of receding circles, which I drew from a small pack and recognized at once to be an eye, something very like the nazar my father had kept in his pocket. I let Hobb have it. I wandered the deck. I filled my canteen at the waterbarrels. Near the stern, a crude barn had been erected, and, making sure I moved unseen, I let myself in, thinking I might shelter till morning.

  And there of course—sightless, blundering into a fog of stink and breath, terrified suddenly beyond reason—what should I find but you?

  MORNING

  AMARGO

  Arizona Territory, 1893

  TOBY CAME RUNNING BACK FROM the creek, empty-handed, to tell her he’d found more tracks—down by the creek this time.

  “All right,” Nora said. “Show me.”

  She reined up and followed her youngest into the gulch. The trail narrowed between high bluffs and let out among the black imbrications of an ancient riverbed before winding for a quarter mile through cottonwoods and down to the shore. Little remained of the stream now save glossy September mud and the wakes of what few salamanders had managed to evade Toby.

  He pointed to where his bucket had dropped. “Them’s the tracks.”

  “Those are,” Nora said.

  It relieved her to see his hair growing back. Through three sons and seventeen years of motherhood, shaving had borne out as the only successful campaign against lice, but its effects were decidedly punitive—Toby looked like a deserter from some urchin militia, sentenced to bear the badge of his dishonor. What if, this time, history should fail him, leaving him bald forever? He made a sorry little man as it was: too thin for seven, soft and golden and clewed-up with doubt. Prone to his father’s wilding turn of mind.

  This business with the tracks had rooted deep, displacing all his other worries and earning him the derision of his brothers, Rob and Dolan, who wouldn’t brook a child’s ghost story now that they were so-adamantly men. The only solution they were charitable enough to entertain—“Just say the word and we’ll bait it, Tobe!”—ran thoroughly against his inclinations, for Toby had no great wish to see the beast; merely to be believed in the matter of its existence. Last week the boys had taken him out to the abandoned Flores claim, site of the tracks’ initial manifestation, to cure him of his nonsense. (By what means Nora could not guess, though she had managed to refrain from warning them to mind his bad eye. They were her boys. Emmett’s sons. Recent outbursts aside, they were upright and vigilant, careful with others in general and with Toby in particular.) Still, she had waited on the porch until they reappeared in the red boil of twilight, two horses dragging long shadows. Dolan bobbing stoutly along, Rob a few yards ahead and so starved-looking at sixteen that she wondered how he was managing to keep Toby upright in the saddle before him with just one arm.

  “Well?” she called. “Did you bare your teeth to whatever’s out there?”

  Rob lifted him down. “Weren’t nothing out there but some grouse and an empty old turtle shell. And we’re all agreed that none of them’s fixing to haunt Toby ever again.”

  A tiny smile dragged the corner of Toby’s mouth. The matter seemed at an end. But then followed morning after morning of Toby at breakfast, his eyes red with sleeplessness. Chin slipping from his hand. Mishandled eggs staining the henyard in his wake. Nights—while Emmett hunched over his Sentinel drafts in the kitchen, and Rob and Dolan lay dead to the world upstairs—Nora put her ear to Toby’s door and listened to the restless rasp of his body under the covers.

  Predictably, Emmett traced their son’s distress to what they were now calling “last year’s mischance.” Anything that went sideways with Toby could be explained away by it: a fall from horseback last March, indistinct, by all appearances, from any of the dozen Toby had brushed off over the years—so very ordinary in its course that Nora hadn’t even bothered to go to him when he fell. “I doubt it could have been helped,” Doc Almenara had assured her later, having declared it a miracle that Toby wasn’t blinded outright. They had been waiting ever since on the sight in his left eye to return, and for reprieve from some of the accident’s other miseries: headaches that set him retching; lightning that streamed through his field of vision; an inability to distinguish waking from dreaming.

  He had come to fear the dark and the shapes that roared out at him from the electric chasm of injured sleep. To make matters worse, he mistook Nora’s tenderness for pity, which she found unfair—she could not help wanting, on those frequent occasions when he bumped a wall or missed a cup-handle, to seize his little head and hold it in both hands. Had he been too young to question her, or old enough to understand, Toby might have grit his teeth through such attentions. But
he was just the right age to find them unbearable.

  Luckily, however, it was past him to question why she might be crouching streamside with him now, making a big show of hearing him out.

  “Look,” he said. “See?”

  She looked. Familiar disturbances marred the bank: a crisscross of skunk and quillpig trails, the smooth sidewind of a snake crossing the wash.

  “There,” Toby said, “and there. See how it’s sunk-in at the top?”

  He was pointing to a dent about the size of a small plate. The drag of his finger through the mud succeeded only in making it look like a picturebook heart.

  “Anything else?”

  He showed her where he thought he could see a few more scuffs scraping off into the sage, and up the old game trail with its trim of heat-withered grass.

  “Must’ve gone up that way,” Toby said. “Loosing these rocks as it went.”

  “Care to offer a thought on what it is?”

  “Well, it ain’t small.” To prove this, he beckoned her to the overgrown hackberry stand just up the shore. Its branches were stripped bare all the way around. The few remaining berries, a withered orrery of orange globes, were all packed way back against the bole.

  “See?”

  “Not a creature alive won’t make quick work of hackberries in a drought, Tobe.” She grew irritated. “Save for Josie, it seems. Didn’t I tell her come and get the rest of these picked before the birds beat her to it?”

  She shouldered in for a fruit and offered it to Toby, but he only squeezed it until its skin snapped and the grit ran between his fingers. Then he wiped his hand on his trouserleg. He was sulling.