by Téa Obreht
The men packed up reluctantly. Back into their bags went the boxes and the bottles, strange cuts of rock wrapped carefully in burlap, sacks of glittering sand. The evening before we departed, Jolly said: “They got a lot of weird stone—but what do they intend to pay us with, Misafir?”
When he raised it with Beecher, the huge man looked puzzled. “Your pay is imminent, boys! Don’t trouble yourselves for another moment.”
I knew at once it was a lie. I know now that we should have threatened to strand them there—though I don’t doubt they had planned for that if they planned for nothing else. I could see Jolly coming to grips with it, too. They had permitted him to dig and hammer away at the rock, but had taken all his findings for themselves and stupefied him with names they had likely invented, betting on the inevitability that all he wanted was gold.
When we got back to Huerfano Creek, the geologists began talking excitedly about their next course of action. They would ride for Los Angeles, there to exhibit their findings and secure more funding for the next trip.
“Fellas,” Jolly said. “Our pay.”
“Pay? Now? But we are only at the beginning of this great venture! The greatest riches are yet to be discovered within the mountain itself. We will have to return! Come back with a larger party and proper equipment. The materials we gathered are just preliminary study, my lads. And we owe it all to you.”
Jolly fumed as only he could. “That was not our agreement.”
In a last-ditch attempt, they wrote us bank checks for fifty dollars. They were conciliatory, but there was nothing to be done. In the morning, they would ride for Los Angeles with their magic rocks, and we for Arizona with our slips of paper. In a few months, they would find us again at Huerfano and enlist us to the task of greater enrichment once more. I expected Jolly to fly into a rage. This was, after all, exactly the thing that most galled him: a failure to admit and rectify wrongdoing.
“Will you imprison them now, as you did me?” I joked, but he was in as foul a mood as I’d ever seen him.
By morning, however, he had changed his tune. He shook their hands sportingly, assured them we would be in Huerfano again the following spring. “Good luck with your findings, gentlemen.” They rode away from us with a warmth of feeling, a joyful wave before they dropped below the horizon.
“What’s got into you?” I asked him.
He was riding along and smiling. I’ll never forget his face. It was a look of complete triumph, and when I asked him again—“Ali, what’ve you done?”—he opened his saddlebag to reveal a perfectly round black rock shot through with rivers of gold.
* * *
—
Well, that assayer in Chubbuck couldn’t make heads or tails of Jolly’s rock. Neither could the prospector in Rice, nor the hermit in Parker to whose abode we were directed by both previous men.
“In my opinion,” the hermit said from behind his quivering and malodorous beard, “its worth is only that it is not of this world.”
By then we were arguing a great deal. Something about the rock troubled me.
“Oh,” said Jolly, “because you’re above thievery yourself.” He pulled his old nazar off its chain and flung it at me. I hadn’t seen it in so long, and the feel of it in my hand reminded me so of Hobb’s want that I almost gave over trying to convince him. But I remembered, too, what it had felt like to be in its grip. “These things are cursed,” I told him. “We become indebted to them.”
He did not care. “Misafir,” he said to me. “All my life some fool has promised me this or that. My father promised me manhood, but all I got was capture. The French promised me gold, but all I got were a couple of camels. Beale promised me pay—do you know he never had me enlisted? That I am entitled to nothing—no backpay, no pension? He never even put in the papers to make me an American. That’s why Lilo left. He said, ‘If it couldn’t be achieved by the kind of journey we took, well then, what will it take? Shall we have to fly to the moon?’ Ten years I worked for that man, and learned only that I might as well never have existed.” We were sitting by night in a clearing full of supplicant yuccas. Their twisted shadows played an odd game with our fire. Jolly looked a hundred years old. “I’m no fool, Lurie,” he said, catching me off guard. “Even if Tibbert and Beecher find us again, they will take us there and back a thousand times and never give us half of what’s owed to us. Better to take their rock and see what we make of it ourselves.”
“Ali,” I said. I intended to tell him what his wife had said about his wayfaring. I meant, too, to tell him about the dead, about their want. Maybe someone’s had gotten into him, and he just didn’t know it. But he looked at me so long that I forgot what I wished to say. I held his nazar back out to him. “All right. We’ll see what your rock is worth.”
* * *
—
But it was not to be. For all that waste, and all that solitude, news travels quick among buscadores. Word got out that there were two Turks out there who’d stolen a priceless rock from the wasteland of the gods. It was worth more than any goldstrike, more than any claim. Drop your pans, the call sounded from Yuma to Hesperia, and join the search.
That these two men were rumored to be accompanied by camels did not help matters one bit. We were fired upon in Reno, and pursued by a small posse outside of Jackson, California. We managed to lose them in the Sheephole desert and spent days there, wandering among the yuccas. It was a good wander, though we damn near died. Only the bees saved us. Our flight always took us to places where it was impossible for others to follow, away from water, and for that we have only you to thank. Jolly grew listless. He stopped eating and sat with his head in his hands a great deal.
“Misafir,” he said one night. “I fear I’ve made a grave mistake.”
“We made it together, you and I.”
“The next posse comes upon us, I’m going to give them the rock.”
And so he did. They were a group of young men not much older than we’d been when we first met. At the outset, they did not believe the prize he handed them was the one they were after. A redheaded boy with shaking hands stood us down with a sixgun while his Mexican partner searched our saddlebags. For a moment, I thought he might take my canteen. I said, “It’s a sin to strand a man without water, son,” which made him throw it back to me. A few hissing drops struck the ground and disappeared.
Jolly’s relinquishment of the rock was a graver mistake than stealing it had ever been. The most outrageous rumors are always the hardest to shed, so the news that we were rid of the cursed treasure did not seem to take. Every few days saw us outrunning or explaining ourselves to some unlikely posse. When Jolly’s face appeared on the board outside the Red Bank jailhouse—WANTED: HEDGY ALLIE: CAMELEER!—we decided to separate, set loose our camels in opposite ends of the desert and join up again in Peres. By that time, we had neither of us seen Trudie nor Amelia in almost a year. I wondered what they would say to see us, so thin and gaunt were we.
“Not so thin nor gaunt as our excuses,” said Jolly miserably.
We were mounted at the Palo Santo crossroads. He would go three days north, toward the Colorado River, and I would take you south to the border and leave you there to your fate. I believe he thought the tears in my eyes were for our parting—his and mine, I mean, and I suppose to some extent they were, for when we rejoined we would be cameleers without camels, and what would that make us? What would we have left to say of ourselves, when the Camel Corps was truly no more, only a reminiscence, and we became old men who talked about a long-ago time we had gussied up for the benefit of disbelieving youth?
For the tears in my eyes, he squeezed my shoulder and put the old nazar back in my hand.
“Have courage, Misafir,” he said. Then he turned north and rode away.
* * *
—
I meant to take you to Fortuna, and there lose you to the Mexican
wilderness. My apprehensions were terrible. I would have to turn you loose near enough dwellings to be able to walk myself back to town. But this would leave you vulnerable to depredation. While we rode, I put it together that I would remove your trappings but leave the bridle on you—so that if any hunters came upon you, they would think twice before firing, lest it turn out you belonged to someone. Though you had belonged to no one, not even me—unless it was the belonging friends make of each other, scarcely existing without traces of themselves in each other’s memories. I had thought my selfishness would overwhelm me, and that I would be thinking of myself as I readied for our parting—imagining what it would be like to live without you. But all I could imagine was your life, Burke, and the things you’d seen on your travels locked away forever in the stores of your own patient mind. Things you might still see. The silence and secrets of wild living. And one day—perhaps in three years or thirty—some passing party would find your bones and wonder how on earth you had come so far, the furthest-flung camel in the world, and perhaps by then the tales of our adventures in the desert would be so well known that whoever found you would recognize what lay before them, and gather all that was left of you into some precious box and hand it down, father to son, running you on for all time.
We went as far as Beulah together. It was springtime in the high desert, and the brilliant blossoms burst from every cactus. The good dry air put a spring in your step that made you look like a meadowed fawn rather than the old rattletrap you were. In a burned-out canyon where the thick little shoots of new life greened the bluffs, a rainstorm overtook us. It was the briefest relief, hot and cold at once, and I uncapped my canteen and filled it there for Donovan, and for all the want that was left in me.
We were crossing a malpais before our afternoon rest when I heard the crack of a rifle and the first bullet came whizzing past. By the time I’d got you wheeled around, a black column of riders was advancing all in one thick cavalcade over the rise.
* * *
—
And so it was that six horsemen caught up with us on the llano that day, Burke, and for all my efforts I could neither save us nor be believed. “You’re that Hadji Ali,” they kept saying. They were young men, blood-drunk. Mad enough when they found my gear empty to send kick after kick into my face and ribs. Where was the rock? Where was the gold-veined treasure?
After a while, rage and disappointment stilled them. If I wasn’t the man they were looking for—the little robber Turk whose face was all over them posters—then what the hell was I doing with a camel? And what the hell were they supposed to do with me?
They mulled this over around their fire that night. My leg was all shot to hell, and my whole chest was beginning to stiffen under my bonds, but I thought it quite a miracle that we were still alive. How long that would continue was uncertain. It was one thing to kill a man outright; but to be stuck with a dying one raises up a kind of superstitious dread in even the sturdiest badman. And as none of them boys looked brave enough to put one behind my ear while I slept, I knew it would be long and slow for me. The trouble was, their whispers were already turning toward the inconvenience of you. Was there someplace a camel could be sold, they wondered, or would it be better to just butcher you here? What might be done with the skin? Which of them would take the head?
“I’m a wanted man,” I called out from where I sat tied up among the trees. “Got a bounty on me far greater than the one Hadji Ali does. Just take me in, you’ll see.”
“Is that right?” they said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Lurie Mattie, formerly of the Mattie gang.”
I can’t say I didn’t care, one way or the other, about saying it—but it wasn’t in my mind to confess it now, to some eavesdropping firmament, before it was too late, either. I only knew this was the last time saying it would ever matter. Not because they’d heard of the Mattie gang, of course. But because they were young, and prone to be turned by details that sounded true and overbold.
“What kinda thing you got hanging over you?” they said.
“I kilt a boy in cold blood—though you’d do well to tell the man you take me to that I also did for a mulepacker named Shaw. It’s the truth, and it’ll get you more money. He’ll believe you.”
“And who would he be?”
“Man named John Berger, out in New Mexico,” I said. “But you’ll have to bring my camel along. He don’t know me without it.”
In the morning, I was lashed to your saddle for the journey. They were taking no chances, these little roughnecks. The rope was wound about my shoulders and my legs and crosswise, then stitched back and forth around the pommel again. In places where my blood had dried, my shirt stuck to my chest. The leg was hurting something awful, too. I’d be dead by nightfall, I thought, and where would that leave you? I could just about see your head hanging over some gloomy saloon door, or your bones laid out in some curiosity tent. What an end for the pair of us, I thought. Goddamn, Burke, but I wished it could’ve gone any other way for you.
Just then, as if you’d felt my want, you blenched. The boy holding your reins jumped back. That great, curdled roar came surging out of you, and you busted through their feeble line and lit out across the sageflat.
* * *
—
They couldn’t have chased us for more than five miles. I can’t be sure, because I couldn’t turn back in the saddle, only sit upright and stare forward. You were damn smart about our escape; went right into the barrens. The edges of the world had begun to dim and shimmer. When I woke, the distant mesas were closer, black bluffs against the first roiling flickers of sunset. By and by all gradations faltered: the reds turned gold and then gray and then black. Your head before me continued loding on through the darkness, a shadow foregrounded against the outflung blanket of stars.
“You’re a good sort, Burke,” I said, uncertain I had ever said it outright. Your ears twitched back to the sound of my voice.
With the morning rising palely to meet us, you stooped to drink at a gulch riffle. I got my finger around the lead-rope and gave a small pull, but it was fastened too tightly. The strength in my hands was gone and I listened to the siren babble of the water recede as you rose and rolled on. Soon enough it was just your steady footfalls thumping dustily along the track. We climbed out of the caldera to see a distant rivercourse of camp lights. “There,” I tried to say, “there.” Your ears twitched back again. You closed distance toward this familiar yellow luminescence. I thought if we could only reach some camp, someone, anyone, would cut me down. We arrived in the wee hours and climbed the hill to the tents. By the fire sat a lank-haired kid of no more than thirteen, striving joylessly on a bone flute. His horses mutinied at the smell of you, and my calls of greeting were drowned out by the racket of campdogs and general riot, and then gunfire. You took off into the shelter of the thin trees and down into the creek, and after a while the voices faded. When I woke again, the pain in my chest was sharp, and we were standing at the edge of a milky white river beyond which the trees groved as evenly as summer clouds.
We passed other camps, other towns. Always in the distance hovered the wavering lights of some possible resting place, and sometimes you strove for them and sometimes you did not, staying in the barrens, bending your neck back and huffing with concern, trying to see me. A smell began to haunt us. Sometimes, when you stooped streamside to drink, a flense-headed buzzard would land nearby and wait.
In the wake of a retreating thundershower, we came to a small town on the plain and crossed in darkness from one end of the thoroughfare to the other. Pools of lamplight shivered in the rutted street. I called out, I think: Hello, salaam, hola! Your ears were upraised and bent forward. A windowcurtain rippled. Sometime later, a porch door opened for a thin-legged child. She stood, still holding the latch, in the white shock of her nightdress and stared across the plaza at you.
She’s afraid, I tho
ught, she’ll stay where she is. But out she came, padding softly toward us. From here, I thought, we must look nothing but a shadow to her. A few more steps, and she’ll hear my voice, broke as it is, and go fetch her pa. She stopped in the middle of the street, swaying on her toes. “Little one,” I said, “it’s alright.”
I’ll never know what drove you to stand in that instant. But you shifted to rise, and the girl turned and ran back to the house, deaf to me.
And as for you—well. You moved steadily through town and out into the dark and haven’t stopped moving since.
Birds followed us from water to water. They sat in the treetops like black bells, so determined by then you could no longer shake them off. Still I kept thinking: if only you’d drift into some camp where they’d hold off shooting long enough to cut me down and give me a drink. I could hear my canteen, ssss ssss ssss, Donovan’s want slung over the saddlehorn. I didn’t care much to see what might be coming. What I longed for was to see less dimly all the things that had been.
I came round one morning not too long afterward in a wakeful dread. There I was, standing beside you, though I could not remember how I’d got free of my bonds, or managed to dismount. All around me, the edges of the world had gone very soft. Muffled and faraway, as if I were looking up from underwater. It was from this halflight that I watched you move past me with the gray arm I recognized as my own hanging limply from your saddle.
I called after you, knowing already that your ears wouldn’t spring back to the sound of my voice again. I don’t care to think often on that moment: watching you start uphill without me. You didn’t get far before you stopped, and that big, worried head came twisting around to get a look at what lay behind. Something troubled you; but it was only my absence you felt, not my hand on your neck, nor my voice in your ear. Then you turned away and kept on up the hill.
