Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

It was intolerable, of course — and yet she did not feel that it was intolerable. There was no conviction in this thought of hers. It seemed passed on, second-hand; it might have belonged to someone else. Suddenly she felt as if nothing could disturb or worry her. She thought she owed this new strength to the letter she had just read and the memories that it had provoked.

But she had been slow to break the silence that lay between them. He spoke first.

‘I wanted to apologise for my behaviour last night.’

Appearing in person like this was an impertinence, she decided, in that she could not simply ignore it, as she might have ignored a letter or a note. It forced her to be civil, diverted her from any blunt response. Appearing in person was a form of manipulation, nothing less. It was clever of him, she had to admit; she almost admired him for it. Though she doubted that he knew what he was doing.

‘I behaved disgracefully. Will you forgive me?’

She let her eyes drift beyond him, out to the west, where the vultures would still be feasting. Of the two events, his shooting of the horse and his arrival at her front door, it would have been hard to say which was the more unlikely.

‘I would like to recompense you.’

His forehead shone. Her continuing silence had brought perspiration to the surface. But why should she make things easy for him? She owed him nothing.

‘To recompense you for any distress you might have suffered by inviting you to accompany,’ he was beginning to stumble over the words, ‘accompany me on a cruise in my submarine.’

‘Submarine?’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘We’ll be leaving at eleven o’clock, from the south quay.’

She looked into his face. His eyes were as soft as a dog’s. He was begging for lenience.

‘You killed your horse,’ she said.

‘The south quay,’ he said. ‘At eleven.’ And, removing his plumed hat and bowing low, he turned away from her and walked back to his waiting carriage.

Wilson did not want to set eyes on Santa Sofía again until the church was finished and those responsible for it had boarded a steamer back to Paris. He would spend the time examining his map, trying to read some significance into its markings, giving it one last chance to prove itself. If he had found nothing after a month he would return to the town. He would burn the map and make a parcel of the ashes, then he would set out for America. His first destination would be his father’s grave in Silver City. The parcel would be opened there, the ashes scattered. He would also change the inscription on the stone. Strike out ‘STILL’ and put ‘DONE’ in its place. ‘DONE LOOKING’.

A few miles out of San Bruno he came across a band of Indians. They were heading north. They had heard that white men were handing out free houses and asked if Wilson knew anything about it. He tried to warn them that the houses were not free, that they were only given in return for labour, but they could not understand his medley of signs and dialect. He was able to buy food, though, trading his hunting-knife for a few strips of sun-dried beef and a sack of hard biscuit known as pinole. This would keep him going on the journey west. He could supplement the diet with prickly pears, which would soon be coming into season, and any fresh meat that he could kill — snake or bat or lizard.

At Comondú, he rested for a day. He climbed down to the bottom of the canyon where a black stream ran over smooth stones and tropical plants grew, green and secretive. He washed his clothes and laid them out to dry on slabs of lava. He found a scorpion that was the colour of grass when it decays. It did not move all morning; it seemed pinned to the rock like a brooch. He bathed in a deep pool, his eyes drifting up the sheer sides of the gorge to the sky above. He willed himself to think only of what he could see: the plants, the rocks; that strip of sky. He resisted memory. It was like a kind of hunger, the hollowness that he began to feel. He filled the bota on his saddlebow with water. On he rode, the trance holding.

Then things began to go awry.

First his mule split a hoof. The next day, as he rode through a viznaga grove, one of the curved thorns ripped his sack of pinole from ear to ear; he lost more than half the contents before he noticed. There was nothing for it. Hauling on the reins, he headed north-east, back towards the coast.

His mule grew steadily more lame. In the end he had to lead the beast. It was the middle of June. The sun dropped on the land like a weight; the air crumpled in front of him. Luckily the moon was full. He could walk all through the night in a bright, metallic daylight, but as soon as a thin wedge of colour opened on the horizon he began to look for shade. He would wake in the early afternoon with flies camping in his nostrils, on his lips. He could find nothing to eat, and his supply of water was running low. He had heard of men lost in the deserts of New Mexico who cut their mules’ ears off and sucked the blood. He hoped it would not come to that.

One evening, climbing through a canyon, he saw a streak of glittering substance in the low cliff to his left. His stomach ached and his tongue was so dry that it creaked in his mouth, but he could not pass it up. You just never knew. He tethered his mule and scrambled up the slope to take a closer look. It was onyx. Some jasper too. Not worth a whole lot, but it might pay a few debts. He worked with a hammer and chisel, the ringing eerie as the light shut down. After an hour he had filled a small panier with crystals.

It was dusk by the time he finished, and the old Indian who stepped out from behind his mule had him jumping backwards in alarm. He had thought himself so alone; he had forgotten there could be anyone else. The old Indian grinned and waggled a hand. He wore a cloak and hat of untanned deerskin, and carried a bow and arrow slung over his shoulder. His sweat smelled of damp ginger. He could speak no English, no Spanish either, only a language that was full of teeth and spit. He kept joining the tips of his fingers together and cramming them into his mouth. Wilson thought he must be hungry. In despair he showed the Indian the rip in his pinole sack and spread his hands. The Indian beckoned. He led Wilson to a shelter at the head of the canyon, just four poles driven into the dirt and a covering of wild flag. A fire crackled out in front; a mongrel sprawled close by. There was water — covered with ants and flies, but drinkable. There was food too. A clay plate of toasted cardon seeds, some aloe heads baked in ashes and half a dozen white grubs, which were as thick and long as Wilson’s thumb, and tasted something like bacon. The Indian talked incessantly; sometimes he seized Wilson by the sleeve, sometimes he raised his face to the sky, mouth wide open, as if astounded by the sound of his own voice. Wilson understood nothing that was said, but he nodded when the Indian left gaps, laughed when he laughed. It was a small return on the food he had been given.

That night they slept on the ground beside the fire. Wilson was woken once, when the mongrel answered the barking of a jackal further up the ridge. Then again, when he heard the old Indian talking in his sleep. He opened his eyes. The Indian was lying on his back, one hand gesturing in the air above his chest. The hand black against the starlit sky. Less like a hand than an absence of something. The shifting of an empty space. A starlessness. He had so much to say; one evening had not been enough.

In the morning he took Wilson round the property. There was a small enclosure at the back, fenced off with cardon ribs, where he grew corn and beans and red peppers. He showed Wilson artefacts that he had made — tools, woven mats, jewellery fashioned out of crystals, bone, the teeth of animals. He wanted Wilson to buy a necklace, but Wilson had no money. Towards evening, afer sleeping through the afternoon, Wilson asked for directions to the coast. The Indian scraped lines in the dust beside the fire. When Wilson walked off down the canyon, the Indian watched him go, nodding and grinning and jamming the fingers of one hand into his mouth.