Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

The others whistle and clap when he jumps up and smacks the dust from his rear and snatches the revolver Lewis reaches to him, grip first.

York smiles for his audience. He shoves the gun in his belt, crabs out his arms, then draws and pops an imaginary round at each of them. He spins the gun on his finger — then loses his grip and it thuds to the ground.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Clark says, “you idiot.”

He slides the bullets into their chambers, then slams the cylinder home as if he has done so a thousand times before, his hands moving with a magician’s adeptness. “What should I aim at?”

The doctor is smoking her pipe, blowing smoke rings. “The moon,” she says.

“Yeah, the moon,” Reed says. “Blast it out of the sky.”

The sun is rising and the moon is sinking out of sight, its crescent like a clean slash. York spreads his legs and raises his arms and draws a bead on it. He holds his breath, then compresses the trigger. The hammer falls with a sharp click.

Nothing.

He lets out his breath. “Broke.” His stance relaxes and the revolver droops to the ground. He snaps the trigger twice more, and then again, and a round blasts from the chamber with a sound and force greater than any of them has experienced before. The dirt kicks up a fist-sized crater beside his foot. The gunshot thunders. He whoops and drops the gun and runs a few paces from it before saying, “Shit! Fuck! Damn!”

Everyone ducks down, their hands clapped over their ears or eyes. Now their shocked expressions give way to laughter. The deep-bellied kind. When York dances over to Gawea and says, “What do you think of that? I shot the moon for you, baby!” even she smiles and brings her hands together twice in mock applause.

It feels strange, almost dangerous, for them to be laughing, and, as if in agreement, they all stop and look over their shoulders as if they might be punished for a moment of levity.

* * *

Gawea wonders if she will have to kill them.

She could do it without any trouble. One by one, a snake curled in a boot, a centipede coaxed into an ear, a few days or weeks between them so as not to arouse suspicion. Or all at once — slit their throats or call down the birds when they are sleeping — but that would be less than ideal. Lewis would know. He would hate her and distrust her and resist her. She has no doubt she could overcome him. He seems so frail, like a bundle of sticks, but it is easier to lead than to drag. She cannot understand why Burr wants him, cannot understand why he refers to Lewis as “the next.” But it is not her job to defy or question. It is her job to deliver, as if he were a parcel. She will deliver Lewis, and then Burr will make good on his promise. Everyone else is expendable.

It hurts to swallow. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to turn her neck one way but not the other. Sometimes she wakes up to a line of ants trundling up her shoulder to taste the wound. It feels like a hot stone is lodged there, as if she could nudge it loose with a cough or a finger. But if she does cough — if she sucks in a lungful of dust or woodsmoke — something bursts and blood or pus fills her hand.

If she really tried, if she kept her voice a whisper, she could probably talk. But she won’t. This way — with the doctor treating her for a slight fever and wrapping her scabbed-over wounds with bandages — she remains the victim instead of a threat. She is the one hurt, not the one who would hurt. They have so many questions, but her answers can only be few when scratched out on paper or in the sand, agonizingly slow.

Burr warned her. He said that Gawea might face resistance. He said that Lewis would not come alone. He said that others would want to chase what she promised — water, civilization — and she would do well to treat them not as an impediment but as a tool. They might slow her down, but so might they prove useful, offering protection and even camaraderie, neither of which she felt she needed. She can protect herself, and she prefers to be alone. She has always been alone, even in the company of others. She is alone now, though they do their best to engage her. It’s the questions that bother her, the constant questions. Some of them logistical: “How many people live in this town you mention, Astoria?” “How about in Oregon?” “In the Pacific Northwest, in the country?” “How does your money work?” “Does everyone speak the same language?” “Where will we live?” “What do people eat?” And some of them poetic: “Will you tell me about the mountains?” “What songs do people sing?” “What does the ocean smell like?” “What does fish taste like?”

And then there is the boy, York, always goofing for her, trying to catch her eye. He rode past her while doing a handstand on his saddle. He juggled three knives along with a chop carved from a javelina’s rump and by the time he finished, it was carved into bite-size pieces that fell neatly on a plate. Sometimes she can’t help herself. Sometimes she snorts a laugh. And when she does, he is only encouraged, saying, “Oh! Look, everyone! Of all the unknown wonders in this new America, I am most in awe of this: our girl actually smiled!”

They watch her. They are suspicious of her, she knows, but they are more suspicious of the world. She tries to keep as still and silent as possible, and then their attention is drawn to a groaning wind turbine, a dead forest, strange splay-toed tracks, a deer carcass opened up and scattered into a thirty-foot orbit.

And they are suspicious of each other, too. They seem wary of Lewis. And they seem worried about the doctor, whether she can keep up. And they seem disturbed by the fact that Reed is fucking Clark. Sometimes this happens quietly, deep in the night, with sighs, shifting fabric, the moist meeting of mouths, and sometimes more obviously, during the day, in an outbuilding within earshot of the group. They are not in love. That is clear. They don’t stare at each other fondly, hold hands, rub each other’s shoulders or feet. The sex seems almost accidentally cathartic, like someone picking up a stone to exercise with or stumbling across a flower to sniff. Clark constantly questions and belittles Reed, and he testily responds that he knows what he is doing and will she lay off already? But they are united, even if only physically, and that alignment makes people nervous. A joining of power, a sharing of secrets.

It could be Gawea won’t have to kill them. It could be they’ll be killed all on their own, maybe by each other.

* * *

Wherever they stay the night, they raid the area for supplies. One time, inside a steel-roofed log home, they find a table still set for dinner and pajamas laid out on the beds, but no bodies anywhere, as though the people who once lived there dissolved into dust. Another time, they find a television in the corner of the living room, the glass knocked from it, the electronic guts ripped out and replaced by dolls and action figures arranged in a still life. Clark stares at it for a long while, as if expecting them to animate and entertain her, but they remain still, entombed in their dark box, and she can’t help but think maybe this is the world, no matter where or how far they ride.

“I thought we would have found something by now,” Reed says and kicks the television, and a few of the dolls fall over.

“Like what?” Clark says.

“Something better.”

She reaches into the broken television and rearranges the fallen figures. “We’ll find it.”

“Will we?”

“I don’t want to hear questions like that. Neither does anybody else. Okay? We need hope right now, not doubt.”

There is a cocoon of soiled blankets on the floor and the back porch is full of garbage — canned food and cereal boxes with their tops torn open. Lewis asks, “Does someone live here?” and Clark says, “I don’t see how that’s possible,” but then they find a plastic mop bucket splattered with shit that still smells and they go silent for a long minute before Lewis asks if they should press on and stay somewhere else. But they have already unsaddled and brushed down their horses, and the sun has set, and the night is so monstrously dark, its star-sprinkled blackness absent of any moon.