Rudolph Wurlitzer - The Drop Edge of Yonder

She started to gulp down a shot of whiskey, then thought better of it. Standing up, she steadied herself on the back of her chair, then slowly made her way out of the room.

'E KNEW HE SHOULD LET HER GO, BUT HE FOLLOWED HER anyway, keeping out of sight as she stumbled out a side door into an alley ankle-deep in mud. Once he thought he had lost her only to have her reappear and turn into a courtyard.

He stood in the shadows as she knocked on the door of a wooden two-story house with narrow windows protected by iron bars. Once again he felt presented with a choice. In the past, he had set his course by his instincts and certain signs: a shift in the wind, a campfire on the horizon, tracks in the snow But now he felt only fear.

When the door opened and Delilah disappeared inside, he continued down the alley to the waterfront. He could ride south to Mexico, he thought. But he had already made that journey. And now there was a bounty on him. Wanted. Dead or alive. He would be better off trying his luck in the gold fields. He had taken enough from Dorfheimer for a decent stake. Or he could go on the drift, up to Oregon or Alaska. He knew how to exist hand-to-mouth. Riding fence, rounding up cattle, busting horses — none of it mattered as long as he was free and unknown. He looked out at the harbor where anchor lights were blinking from hundreds of ships. The whole place was on the gallop with orders to fill. If one direction didn't work out, there would be ten more.

The hell with her, he thought, then returned to where he had left her. He rolled a smoke in the courtyard, then stubbed it out and knocked on the door.

A Chinaman opened the door, staring at him through spectacles the size of bird eggs. A long black queue fell past his waist and his reed-like body was covered with a silk maroon robe.

Zebulon followed him into a claustrophobic low-ceilinged room lit by sputtering candles. In the dim half-light he made out a couch and a row of armchairs filled with shadowy figures that he figured were women for hire.

"You want?" the Chinaman asked and snapped his fingers.

A pubescent girl no more than fourteen rose up from a chair, clacking towards him on wooden sandals, a loose yellow shift hanging from her bony small-breasted frame.

"Young delight," the Chinaman said. "Small buds. Like peaches. Good for the heart."

His voice was oddly precise, as if he had learned English from a missionary

"I'm lookin' for a woman," Zebulon said. "A mix. Not white or black. A long tangle of black hair."

The Chinaman shook his head. "Delilah not for sale."

"Not to buy," Zebulon insisted. "To talk."

The Chinaman smacked his hands together as if killing a mosquito. "Twenty dollars. But no touch. Only smoke."

After Zebulon paid, he followed the Chinaman into a back room that smelled of burned chestnuts. A low table held a lamp and several bowls filled with black opium paste. Emaciated men lay on their sides on narrow tiers of bunks, their heads resting on polished blocks of black wood. Delilah lay on a lower bunk, inhaling a long bamboo pipe lit by an old Chinese woman wearing a black high-necked dress.

"Are you dreaming me?" she asked with a smile as he lay down beside her. "Or am I dreaming you? Or are we being dreamed by someone else?"

She sucked at the pipe, then slowly exhaled.

"Where's my necklace?"

It took him a while to remember. "Stolen."

"I'm not surprised. Everything else has been stolen or taken from me. The only thing left is to invest in loss…. Do you ever ask yourself who belongs to whom…? Or why? Or why- it is that most people prefer to rush towards their death rather than step out of the way?"

The old woman offered him a pipe, then held up a long wire with a smudge of opium resin on the end. After he lit the resin, she motioned for Zebulon to inhale. He repeated the procedure several times until he turned on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

Delilah's voice drifted over, like a leaf on a slow moving river. "If she rubs your feet, you'll float in the air."

He wasn't floating. He was a frog pinned beneath a giant thumb until he moved a finger back and forth in front of his eves.

"I betrayed Ivan," Delilah said. "And I betrayed you. But if you had stayed on the ship, Ivan would have killed you. He tried it before. In New Mexico. Or was it Turkey?"

He remembered being a small boy and watching an eagle feather drift down from a blood-red sky and then land gently on his head.

"It's a sign," his Pa said after he shot the eagle. "I'm damned if I know what it means. Only that it's better not to think about it."

"Are you aware that dark spirits are searching for us?" Delilah asked. "For Ivan…. And for me…. And for you…. That's all they know how to do. They hunt for prey, and when they find it they swallow it, as if they intend to take on who they kill."

They lay side by side, legs and sides barely touching, smoking and slipping in and out of each other's dreams. He felt suspended somewhere between earth and sky.

"Or nowhere at all," he said to the fingers rubbing his feet.

The thought was pleasing, that of going nowhere at all. Never to move on. Never to hunt. Never to leave one place for another. Or one woman for another.

Her voice found him again. "After San Francisco, we rode north, Ivan and I…. So wild, so many rivers to cross and guns and horses. Ivan found more gold than anyone would ever need. Then he lost it all in a card game. He lost me, too…. So many men…. I was the only woman for a hundred miles… brutal men…. I never wanted to see you again…. You're wanted for murder… stealing horses… robbing banks…. A very dangerous man. When I saw you in that Mexican hotel I knew you were hunting me…. What I didn't know was that I was hunting you as well."

He curled up like a frightened animal, his arm over his eyes, his heart beating as if he was imprisoned inside a trap.

An old woman wrapped inside a man's button-down canvas jacket was bending down, holding a pipe, inviting him to inhale, to disappear into another dream….

"Men came from everywhere to hear me sing," Delilah was saying. "Then Ivan found me again. He always does, you know. And then he leaves."

Someone was playing a flute in another room and a woman was singing about love and a journey that never ends.

"Now Ivan will die. When he abandoned me in London, an Englishman took me in. A singing teacher. An aristocrat…. I have a certain weakness for aristocrats. So distant and unobtainable…. He taught me opera…. How to speak and read English…. Every time I tried to leave him, he became very cruel."

Across the room the Chinese girl was massaging the singer's feet, or maybe they were his own feet. Her scent made him feel as if he was lying in the middle of a garden. Or a cemetery.

"Ivan found me making love to the Englishman," she went on. "He wanted to kill me. He had been in prison. In Russia…. They tortured him…. There are scars on his cheeks from cigarette burns. He's not a count, you know…. He's a spy and a scoundrel and a businessman. He smiled when he shot the Englishman through the head."

He wondered if Ivan had shot him in Panchito. Or had it been Delilah? Or someone else? Was he, in fact, dead, and dreaming his life and how it had been or might have been? He was on a journey. He was sure of that. A journey that he was unable to track, without a beginning or end, with no boundaries to guide him.

Her voice drifted back to him: "When my parents died, I lived with my grandmother…. She was over a hundred years old…. I had come to her in a dream before I was born…. Because I have mixed blood from many different races, she told me not to become trapped between worlds… I never listened to her, and now it is my fate… to learn how to die, over and over…. In my previous life I… I can't remember…. She told me to leave everything that I was attached to… even her, in order to be in the world but not of it…. When a Portuguese slaver killed my grandmother and took me away, I lost faith in God…."