by Téa Obreht
“They can swim, of course?” Beale asked, which was when it became plain to all that he’d awaited our return with the sole aim of asking this question of Jolly before he blundered all those camels into the water and drowned the War Department’s entire herd.
Jolly didn’t know. He paced up and down the bank, looking for the gentlest descent into the water. “Ain’t you ever seen a camel swim?” I asked him.
“Where would I see a camel swim?”
The Mojave people had come up from their fields; the women, their faces ink-lined, whispering down to the kids; the lanky youths drawn together, doubting us with weary smiles.
By afternoon the wagons were across and a mule and horse had drowned. There was nothing left to do but rope the camels together and drive the first of you into the water. Jolly edged down the bank, his boots sliding. Behind him, Seid fought the drag of the scree, then gave up and eased forward. Water parted around his neck and the hummock of his back, and the white lengths of his legs flashed palely in the gloom below.
Cheers from all present, save the Mojave, who were just then turning, impassively, one by one, downstream toward another absurdity: the far-off gray wedge of a ship’s stern turning slowly into this crook of the river. It was a sidewheeler, the General Jesup. The whole magnificent hulk of it came slowly into view. To this day, Burke, I couldn’t tell you who was more surprised by what lay before them: those of us on the shore who were seeing, for the first time, a vessel in these once unnavigable waters, or the fellas on the ship, who beheld our camels dotted throughout the stream.
* * *
—
That river crossing was Saleh’s first swim and final journey. Our detour to the star-crossed wagon train, and the loss of Mico, had all but played her out. Beale thought to leave her here to find her way—but Jolly didn’t think this especially merciful. “Do as you see fit,” Beale said. “Only tell me nothing of it.”
So he never wrote about Jolly cutting her throat and draining her blood and butchering her there on the shores of the Colorado while the heedful Mojave looked on. He wrote nothing of how Jolly cut the meat into huge pieces and handed them, hunk by hunk, out to the waiting crowd.
By evening, all of Saleh had been given away save the hump, which Ab roasted dubiously over a spit until it was black. Afterwards we sat watching the steamer draw near and talking on Mico, his impatience and boldness and bad taste in jokes, the way he fussed over his clothes, until our hearts were full of him. Around us the silver undergrowth rustled with small nighttime stirrings. The Mojaves’ fires burned on both shores.
“These people,” Jolly said, when the others had gone to bed, and it was just the two of us sitting wakefully side by side again. “They don’t look too bothered by that ship.”
“No.”
“They don’t look too impressed either.”
“I guess not.”
“And they don’t look too bothered by the camels.”
This seemed to trouble him. He took some time to puzzle it out. “It’s the same thing to them: ship, camel. What’s the difference? There’s no miracle in it. It’s just another means of their end.”
“I guess so.”
“My grandmother used to say that when the Turks first came to her town, they built a great bridge. But nobody could bring themselves to love it. They wanted us to believe that something extraordinary had come, but we never could make ourselves feel that way about it. The miracle wasn’t for us.”
“But ain’t you a Turk?”
He dragged a hand across his eyes. “I reckon by now I ought to be.”
“Well, there you have it. You’re lucky to know, one way or the other.”
“Make no mistake, Misafir: so are you. In your tongue and in your very bones, so are you.”
I don’t mind telling you, Burke—I felt as though he’d just put his arms around me.
“Well,” I said, when I could speak again. “That’s something, anyway.”
The General Jesup tied up and all that long and wondrous night and into the following morning we watched the passengers coming ashore. They were rough, unwashed traders and trappers from downriver. They had come to encroach on our sorrow with their hides and steamer trunks, their violins and whiskey barrels, the merriment of a long journey’s end.
As we sat there at our breakfast, a pair of mottled calfskin boots made their way down the gangplank—and who was wearing them, Burke? You know already. Who in this weird, wild world could be wearing them calfskin boots off a steamer in the southern reaches of the Colorado River, but the wolf himself: Marshal John Berger.
I might have thought him among the dead had he not walked straight through the crowd and and into Beale’s embrace.
“What’s that man’s business here?” I asked George.
After some reconnaissance, an answer was got. “He’s some lawman, it seems,” George said. “Old friend of the Lieutenant’s.”
Well, I hid in our tent and slunk around with my head shawled. But that very night Berger found me at the fire. “I know you, I think,” he said, clasping my hand.
Because I’d been thinking all day of nothing but our last encounter, I said: “Yes. From Fort Green.” Too quickly, the words had leapt from my mouth. If only I’d taken a breath, a moment longer to speak. His brows met and I saw him wondering—if I was not precisely the man he suspected me to be, why in hell should I remember some murky night so clearly, so quickly, so certainly? I had given myself away.
“Well,” Berger said. “I’ll be damned. That must be it.”
* * *
—
You can hardly blame me, Burke, for what I did—though I have wondered since how things would have turned out for you had I chosen different. Before the deed was done, I tipped back my canteen only to see the inside of some dreary gray saloon, a pair of speckled hands, a bowl of uneaten soup. The vision gave me courage. It must be myself in old age, I thought. I lay in the cameleers’ tent one last time and imagined myself walking north until I fell, shriveled with thirst or full of bullets.
* * *
—
We had run so long together already—was there any chance of my leaving you behind?
Jolly was waiting for us when I led you into the trees. “Who is that man?” he asked me.
“What man?”
“The man you’re fleeing.”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody? You’re thieving one of the War Department’s camels on account of nobody?”
At length, I said: “That’s the man been searching for Lurie Mattie these three years gone.”
Jolly stood a long time with his pipe brightening the edges of his face. “I ought to shoot you. I ought to shoot you right now.” Then he took off his hat and turned his jaw sideways to me. “Strike me here.” He pointed. “But take good care not to murder me.”
AFTERNOON
AMARGO
Arizona Territory, 1893
ABOUT A MILE FROM HOME, Nora caught up to a dustcloud. She mistook it first for a running antelope, but when it turned down her drive she recognized Doc Almenara clipping along in his new spring wagon—a glinting marvel of a thing, almost insolently beautiful, as black as the pair of horses that pulled it. Hat raised, the Castilian was already standing up in the boxseat to call out: “Hullo hullo hullo. Hullo, the house!”
At his sixtieth birthday—or so Nora had heard—Hector Almenara Vega had been the first man on the hardwood and the last man to bed. He was tall, limber, and pinstraight, and exuded the irrepressible energy of a daddy-longlegs. A whitish scruff of beard—the last vestige of his once-glorious hair—hedged his chin. Nora had never seen him out of uniform: sunhat, coattails and cravat, blinding shoes, soft riding gloves that inspired reverence of whatever antelope had given its life to produce them. Twenty years into his tenure as Amargo’s physician, with the mercu
ry at a hundred and sixteen, the Doc still dressed for what he had expected Amargo to become: a boomtown, a real one, with a railhead whose boards were thick with similarly disposed people: people who could quote operas and speak knowledgeably about military campaigns and the value of gold—not the kind you found in the ground, but the kind that set what he mysteriously referred to as “the market.” People whom Emmett derisively referred to as “snail-eating folk.”
“In fairness,” she once told her husband, “I’m glad of his tastes, for without them I doubt I would ever have tasted turtle soup. And he’s never served us snail.”
Emmett had squeezed her arm teasingly. “You needn’t make singularia tantum of invertebrates.”
The boys had come up calling him Doctor Hector. Because he’d been a friend to them—childlike himself in many ways, indulgent and playful and extravagant—they found his charms impossible to outgrow. Unsurprising, then, that Toby and Josie fell all over themselves running out to greet him, Toby with the sorry carcass of the windhover outheld before him like some magnificent prize. The Doc was making the recognizable gesture of admiration, following this up with a vigorous pantomime. Now his gloved hands framed an invisible rectangle. By the time Nora drew up, his tutorial was at an end: “And that, caballero, is how to display a dead bird.”
“You’re not making anything of that filthy thing,” Nora called. “God’s heaven, Toby.”
The Doc turned over his shoulder. “The lady of the house! Were you in town? How’s the Sheriff?”
She managed to overcome her surprise. “He wasn’t in.”
The Doc stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. “The young man’s got a fine specimen here,” he said. “It just beggars my own offering.” He hoisted a towel-wrapped dish off the boxseat and held it out with ceremony. “Pan dulce.”
She wished he had brought water. She eyed up the back of the spring wagon, but it was empty save for a blanket draped jauntily over the seat. Just as well—Emmett didn’t like her to invite the Doc’s largesse. He was forever undercharging them for his services, calling over unannounced so they could not find the pretext to refuse him. Her arm sweated around the dish while they exchanged pleasantries: the Doc’s son, Alejandro, was thriving at an apprenticeship in Mexico City. His wife was back to sleeping through the nights following this latest break in the heat, and quite well, quite well indeed—an understatement if Nora had ever heard one, for she’d watched them at the Christmas social, the tall doctor and his stout little wife, mutinying the ravages of time with their lopsided polka.
Inside, Doc Almenara began his rounds with a tour of the topographical wonders that comprised Toby: his mineshaft ears, his bouldersome teeth, his acreage of limbs. “Bigger every day! They must be feeding you the world!” His hand scraped Toby’s scalp. “But you’re a hedgehog. Lice, was it? How long since they stopped biting?” The answer—a whole week!—seemed a cause for celebration. On the subject of Toby’s eye, however, the Doc grew stern. “How do the lights look now?” Toby drew a darting shape in the air, circumscribed it with something jagged on all sides. The Doc flipped Toby’s eyelid and loomed close. “How are you finding your way about?”
“Well enough.”
“Why aren’t you binding this eye?”
“It’s too hot.”
“And are you riding?”
“Not if I can help it.”
The Doc shook his head. “We made a gentlemen’s agreement: no riding at all.”
“It’s some work, doc, not riding at all.”
“I meant what I said: one solid bump could blind you outright.” He turned to Nora. “No riding, no roughhousing, no lake-diving.”
“Where on earth would he go lake-diving?” Nora said.
“I don’t know. Perhaps some secret spring only he knows. When Alejandro was your age, he was forever finding the impossible. He’d have had the Israelites to Canaan in less than a week.” He scratched Toby’s head again. “I pray this grows back to you with speed. What’s the good of living with the finest barber this side of the Picketwire if she can’t keep you looking fit for company?” The barber in question was twisting her red braid beamingly in the doorway. “Well, Josie? Still cutting hair?”
“When folks need it cut.”
His hand rasped the shining bald dome of his own head. “Is this past your powers?”
“My papa was bald as you in his day, Doctor Hector, and I fixed it up for him with a little primrose oil.”
These ongoing allusions to his hairline were either a force of habit, or an unguarded glimpse down the warren of his vanity. Nora thought it must be the latter: after all, he was the only man in town who had a gas stove—the acquisition of which he hadn’t even bothered to pass off as a gift for his wife. He had gone so far as to meet it at the Flagstaff depot personally. Its arrival in town, by eight-mule team, had been processional. But Nora, standing under the awning of Lark & Sons the day it arrived—a huge, sleek hulk of a thing, gleaming in the wagonback—had felt then, as she did now, that his vices were forgivable in their frankness. No person who actually cared about what was being said could inspire so much gossip. He was himself, and himself to everybody.
He loomed over to Gramma. “And Missus Harriet. Keeping spry?”
“She moved herself again today,” Josie said.
“Didn’t we just get done talking about falsehoods?” said Nora.
“It’s true.” Josie turned to the Doc. “I was fixing breakfast this morning with my back to her, talking loud as you prescribed, real slow so she can follow along. Telling her about Montana—this place where they got a Christmas fair, the best in all the world it’s said, because of the Germans living thereabouts. Only she must not’ve been too keen on any of that talk, for next thing I know I’m turning around and the young mister here is wheeling her back in from the porch.” Josie nodded vigorously at the Doctor’s surprise. “I never seen it happen myself, but I swear to the Lord it’s true. Ask Toby. Happens right around the same time: early in the morning or just past sundown. Best I can figure is, these are the times she gets so overcome with who she was before being brainhurt that she gathers up the strength to go looking for herself again.”
“What a glorious sentiment, Josie.” He took her hand and shook it a little. “You’ve the soul of a poet.”
“Rather than waste the Doctor’s time,” said Nora, “perhaps you might draw his attention to that unexplained rash on your neck?”
The Doc took the opportunity of Josie’s dropping her chin into her hand to move on. “Is it true, Missus Harriet? Have you been jailbreaking?” Gramma’s cheeks collapsed sourly. He looked her over, easing a line of careful squeezes along her joints, down one arm and up the other. Entreating her to smile so he could get a look at the ground-down stumps of her teeth, he lifted her lips to afford the dignified illusion that she was doing it herself. Before her stroke, Gramma had taken great care to be furtive about the way she writhed out of his grasp. As though her dignity would be diminished if she betrayed her distaste for him and all Mexicans in general. But now her very soul fought him tooth and nail. You could see it in her eyes, in every rigid inch of her being. He knew, of course—had seen a lot of it, Nora suspected, from newcomers to the territory. The harder his patients resisted, the more he seemed to make a point of not letting it dissuade him from his work. She stood by, drifting between embarrassment and the ravenous trumph of seeing the old lady fail to conceal herself.
Finally, he turned to Nora. “And you, Missus Lark?”
She was thirsty. Three boys, a slip of a girl and an invalid old lady’s watering privileges outranked hers. She had gone to bed thirsty and woken up thirsty; she had passed the morning with a throat so parched it hurt her to speak; so parched she had balmed it with whiskey and bitter coffee until it burned, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last had a whole mouthful of water. She said: “My
head’s been paining me a little.”
He felt her temples. “You’ve took too much sun, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
“Nora,” he said teasingly. “You’ve not been drinking, have you?”
THEY CONVERGED AT THE LITTLE parlor table just off the kitchen. Through the window, she could keep an eye on Toby and Josie’s outdoor maneuverings, which seemed, at this moment, to involve making a kind of sepulchral structure for the mummified bird. She had nothing to offer her guest save corncake, which he perched stiffly on his knee with the air of a man who would suffer it, if needs must, but not a moment before it was absolutely necessary.
“Glad as I am to see you, Hector, we haven’t called you round because the burdens of this last month have put us right past our debts.”
He held up a hand. “If I only tended patients who could afford to pay me every time I came around, Nora, the dead in this town would vastly outnumber the living.”
“Well. If Josie’s to be believed, they do.”
He laughed, showing all his teeth. Out came his faded leather notebook. “When do you think you’ll be solvent again?” he said. “The tenth? The eleventh?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll give you grace till the seventy-fiftieth.” He pressed an invisible pen against the page, swirling loops of empty air. “And may God help you, Missus Lark, if you’re still in arrears then.”
“Hector.”
Failure to sound amused at his joke earned her a squeeze of the hand. He set about cracking into the cake with his front teeth and larding on thin flattery of her cooking. She let him get on with it. Amada Rios Borrego de Almenara, when she rolled up her sleeves and routed her servant girls, was widely known as the finest cook in the entire Territory. People who fed and watered at her house only ate elsewhere to remind themselves to be thankful for the good fortune of going home.
