Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

Wilson laughed. ‘More than enough.’

Wilson chose a beach that was just south of San Bruno. It had a platform of flat rocks to moor against, and sea-grape clustered thickly at the water’s edge, providing anchorage for the boat and some degree of shade.

‘But this is beautiful,’ Suzanne exclaimed.

He let his eyes travel beyond her, along the curve of blinding sand. The burnt-orange hinterland bristled with cardon and ocotillo. Out to sea, there were small islands, as rough and pink as grazed skin, and the sky above was that uncanny blue, so bright and hard that if you stared into its depths, it threatened to turn black.

While Namu gathered brushwood for the fire, Wilson put up the parasol that he had borrowed from the company store. Suzanne had brought a straw hamper and a Mexican rug with her. She spread the rug out on the rocks and began to unpack: plates, glasses, bottles of water and fruit cordial, knives and forks, two loaves of fresh bread, some green tomatoes and a few ripe figs.

She glanced up, caught him. watching her. ‘It’s only a few simple things,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing special.’ Her eyes had captured so much light that it was hard to look at her.

He piled stones around the base of the parasol, then sat down close to her. They were silent, taking in the view. Dark-purple shells the size of dishes lay scattered along the shoreline, rolling and scuttling as the waves pushed up the beach, pulled back, pushed up again. Three pelicans flew north, their bellies no more than a finger’s width above the surface of the water. Soon a crackling began. Namu was turning the fish on a wooden spit, and all its fats and juices were spilling down into the fire.

In twenty minutes it was cooked. The meat, pinkish-grey and succulent, fell into easy slices on their plates. It tasted so good, they could not pause to speak. They ate with their fingers, to be closer to the food; the knives and forks lay near by, still glittering and clean, parts of their lives that had been abandoned, disdained. Afterwards they crouched by the sea and washed their hands, returning to the shade of the parasol to lean against rocks or rest their heads on cushions.

With the brim of his hat pulled low over his eyes and his vision narrowed to a strip of blue water, Wilson began to talk about his feelings for gold. He wanted to try and explain how it was. He had been born in a wagon at the edge of a road in Iowa. Come to think of it, he was not so sure about the road. It could have been a track or a riverbed or just plain grassland, featureless and wide. Still, it was probably fair to say that he had been born in transit, on the way to somewhere. Born with movement in his blood. Later, his father would tell him of the many strange sights that they had witnessed on their journey west. A wardrobe standing by a river, its mirrored door ajar; snakes coiled among the rows of ballgowns that still hung inside. A four-poster bed beneath a tree (they spent the night in it). And, once, abandoned on the prairie, quite alone, a grand piano. Its stout legs bound with weeds. Wind whipping through the strings. A sound so mournful, they heard it for weeks after. Like everyone else they were forced to offload most of what they owned, fetching up in San Francisco with a few pans and a blanket. He had never had much, never wanted much. He could not imagine being rich. No, it was the idea of gold. The feel, the colour — the idea of it. It was out there someplace and you never quite knew where; it was the looking for it. It ran beneath your days like time itself. It measured just about everything you did. It was the joy you felt for no reason. The thought of gold pushed everything else to the sides of your head, like a room cleared for dancing.

He looked across at Suzanne, saw that she had understood.

‘But tell me, Wilson. How did it begin?’

‘Let me show you something.’

He sat up, took off his jacket and, borrowing Namu’s knife, began to unpick the stitching on the lining. After opening the seam along one edge, he reached his hand inside. And slowly drew a piece of parchment out into the air.

‘It’s a map?’

He nodded. ‘It’s my father’s map.’ He spread the parchment on the ground and put stones on the corners to keep it flat. ‘We travelled together many times looking for gold. We never did have much success. Then, one fall, the fall of ‘82 I think it was, we headed down to Reno. Reno, Nevada.’

His father sensed that his luck had changed. He said a man just knew sometimes. He claimed there was gold waiting for them at a gaming-table, a whole heap of it. He claimed it had the name Pharaoh written all over it. His father was not given to mystical episodes or premonitions of any kind — in fact, he had always poured mockery on fortune-tellers, calling them a pack of charlatans. His announcement was so unlikely, such a departure from the rule, that Wilson thought there must be something in it.

In those days the town of Reno had a reputation for lawlessness. Assaults were commonplace, even in broad daylight. Greed had men reaching for their guns; greed pulled the trigger. The time to arrive was just after dawn. Cold-streak gamblers would already be asleep. The rest would be locked deep into their games, with eyes for nothing else. There was less chance of trouble at dawn; they might even live long enough to sit down at a table and win themselves some money.

They walked in with the first fingers of light, one morning late in September. The desert floor creaked as the chill lifted. Wilson could see the low brown buildings of the town, and the mountains behind, violet and grey and mauve. The way it had been set with such deliberation in the middle of nowhere, it had the look of a place that could settle your destiny, if you were prepared to hand that power over. He took the keen air into his lungs and whistled under his breath. His thoughts were falling into line with his father’s thoughts. The ground stood firm beneath his feet. Out here there would only be fine days.

On the edge of town, they passed a shack. A man was saddling up outside. His father hailed the man. Said they’d been walking through the night and could the man spare a drop of water for their thirst.

The man studied them across the horse’s neck. ‘Ain’t got no water, but I could sell you a couple beers.’

His father said that beers would do just fine. The man named a high price, and his father paid. They sat in the shade behind a wall and drank from the cool brown bottles. When Wilson remarked on the man’s avarice, his father shook his head.

‘This here’s a town of transactions. People came out here with money and threw it around, and the town sprang up like money was the seeds for it. The price of beer’s steep because people can afford it. If the beer was cheap, then we’d be in the wrong place for what I got in mind. It’s no more than I was hoping for. It’s a good sign.’

During the next five days his father let it be known that he was a road agent, a gambler and a horse-thief. All the bad things he had ever done, he owned — and he invented some more, just to be on the safe side. The only shame in a town like Reno, or so he claimed, was a life lived according to the law. He boasted of robberies he had never committed, men he had never killed. His crimes swirled around him like some voluminous, embroidered cloak. They had arrived in town on Monday. By Saturday they were being shown into a private room at the back of the Lame Mule Saloon.

He had never seen his father play cards before. Imagining disaster, he could not watch. Instead he let the room absorb him. It was some place. Tall gold pillars, scarlet drapes. Walls that were said to be bullet-proofed with sheets of corrugated iron. Paintings of women, naked beneath transparent scarves. One had hair like Saffron’s, and he stared until the face came too; even after fifteen years, he had not forgotten it. Then, towards midnight, the doors burst open and a burning girl walked in. Her face serene, but all her clothes on fire. Three men put her out with French champagne. Afterwards, she stood beneath the chandelier, her arms raised, the fingers on each hand spread out to form a crown. She seemed unharmed. A man in a white derby turned to him. The man had to shout to make himself heard above the whistling and the applause. ‘Most nights she shows up,’ he said. ‘We call her Flaming Lil.’ When Wilson looked round again, the girl had gone. The air filled with string music, and the watery slap and lick of cards. From time to time someone would kill someone else with a revolver and smoke would drift upwards from the barrel, mingling with the fumes of a gambler’s cigar. One man, wounded or dead, would be removed, and the music would start up again and the game would continue. It got so he could tell the difference between the smoke from a gun and the smoke from a cigar: the gunsmoke had more blue in it. His father was smoking too, he noticed, when he could bear to look, the smudged black letters of the horse-thief’s brand showing casually on his thumb as he brought his cigar up to his mouth.