Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

He stood up and stretched. Hung his shirt over the back of a chair, leaned his shovel and his pick against the wall, wrapped his rifle in a rag. But still he could hear her voice accusing him. You’ve been avoiding me.

‘I’ve been away,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’

He was talking to an empty room.

It was no good; he could put it off no longer. He left the hotel and started up the hill to the Mesa de Francia.

On the Calle Francesa the silence had a different quality, denser, more deliberate. It was not silence that had fallen so much as silence that had been striven for. It was like held breath. There was nobody parading up and down beneath the trees, nobody drinking on the veranda of the Hôtel de Paris. The French sat inside their houses, quarantined by apprehension and uncertainty.

And suddenly he did not know why he had come. He stopped in front of the steps that led up to her house. Turned away, turned back. Then turned away again, his mouth dry and all his courage, or whatever it had taken, gone. He saw his father, standing at the window of a boarding-house in Denver. He heard his own voice reach across that dusty room; he heard the words that he had promised his mother he would say.

‘Maybe we should think about heading home.’

Shirt-sleeves rolled, one forearm resting on the sash, his father was staring down into a sunlit street.

‘We could rest up for a while. I could get a job. Playing piano, like I used to.’

His father was still staring, down into that sunlit street.

‘The Empire would take me on — ’

At last his father turned back into the room. His eyes seemed to have darkened and expanded. ‘You forgot, didn’t you?’

‘Forgot what?’

‘You forgot.’

He could not look away from his father’s face. He could not speak. His right hand closed around the stone he carried in his pocket. Smooth stone, from the River Gila. Smooth, smooth stone.

His father sat down on the bed. ‘Let me remind you. He pulled the shirt off his back, the buttons scattering, and there were the scars, gnarled, almost black, a stack of sticks piled for a fire.

The shirt caught round his elbows, his father began to weep. ‘I can’t go back,’ he was saying, ‘how can I go back?’

It was another three years before he was ready, and by then it was too late.

One bat jinked past, as if the air were full of obstacles. Wilson tipped his face till it was level with the sky. The stars glowed and faded, glowed and faded. They made him feel ill.

He had to think.

He hid in the narrow strip of land that separated Suzanne’s house from the house next door. Stood with his shoulderblades against the wall, sweat crawling on his skin. There were two windows on this side of the house. One dark, one lit. The light thrown like a playing-card on the ground. A shadow passed between the window and the lamp. He inched closer, risked a look inside. Monsieur Valence stood over his desk, sealing an envelope with a bead of scarlet wax.

Wilson edged along the south wall, careful to avoid the needles of the century plant. He ducked beneath the flight of stairs that led down to the kitchen hut. Two dark windows, then another playing-card of light. The north side of the house. He did not recognise the room. A girl with black hair sat with her back to him. He could not see her face, only the nape of her neck and one hand curving away from her body, returning, curving away again. She might have been a marionette, her body motionless, one hand controlled by a secret string. Lifting himself higher, he saw that she was mending a dress of Suzanne’s. He moved on, reached the front of the house once more. He noticed a lamp burning in a window on the first floor. He saw a shadow swoop across the ceiling. That was where she must be. And it was all he could know of her tonight, that lamp, that shadow. But it was a comfort to be close to her, and then imagine. It was enough. He would sleep now.

On his way back down the street a voice called his name. He looked round. The doctor sprang from his veranda as if he had been fired from a bow. He did not glitter this evening. He did not shimmer or shine. He was dressed in a surgeon’s coat, plain white, with no adornments.

Wilson felt the need to explain himself. ‘I was just out walking,’ he said.

‘On a night like this, Monsieur Pharaoh, it would be wiser to stay at home. May I join you, though?’ The doctor chuckled, rubbed his hands.

‘Please do. You’re going to the hospital, I take it?’

‘I have been there all afternoon. But there is more to do. Much more.’ The doctor danced along the empty street on the points of his toes like a young girl learning ballet. ‘You have heard, presumably?’

Wilson nodded.

‘A terrible business. A tragedy, in fact. Three fractured legs. A crushed pelvis. More cracked ribs than I can count.’ He let out a sigh that seemed at odds with his excitable gestures and his light balletic walk.

‘How many dead?’ Wilson asked.

The doctor threw him a wary glance. ‘No figures have been released.’

Wilson did not pursue the subject. They passed the de Romblays’ house. A carriage stood outside, attended by a man with rows of bullets gleaming on his chest.

‘Montoya’s,’ the doctor said.

He told Wilson that the Director had already spent almost three hours trying to persuade Montoya that it was unnecessary to kill anyone. That, far from restoring order, it would ignite a situation that was highly flammable, provoking hostilities on the streets of Santa Sofía, if not anarchy. A state of affairs which Montoya, with his handful of soldiers, would be powerless to remedy. But the young Mexican seemed wedded to the idea.

‘Do you know what he said?’ The doctor leapt in front of Wilson, showing all his teeth in an astonished smile. ‘“I will shoot them down, like dogs.”’

‘Has he lost his mind?’

The doctor did not take the question lightly. ‘It’s possible.’ He sighed again and resumed his place at Wilson’s shoulder. The two men walked on.

When they reached the hospital, the doctor bounded up the stairs and then spun round, addressing Wilson from the veranda. ‘And your foot, Monsieur. How does it feel?’

Wilson smiled. One broken foot after all this talk of legs and ribs and anarchy. It hardly seemed worth mentioning.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just fine.’

A momentary gloom descended on the doctor. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s something.’

Seventeen dead. That was what the Indians were saying. They had gathered in the Hotel La Playa, shouting and spitting, clutching at the air, their faces brassy against the pale-green walls. The lobby bubbled like a cauldron with their voices. They did not pay Wilson much attention as he climbed the stairs to bed.

When he reached the top, he noticed a strip of light beneath his door. It was wavering — bright and steady one moment, almost invisible the next. Somebody had lit a candle in his room.

The door was ajar. He could hear voices coming from inside. A woman’s, then a man’s. He moved closer, testing each floorboard for creaks before he took a step. Then shoved the door open and stood in the gap.

It was the men he noticed first. He thought he had seen the tall one before. On the waterfront, maybe, or in the bar. A jaw like a horseshoe, hard and curved. Bloodshot eyes. The other one, a foot shorter and dressed in miner’s rags, did not register.

‘Welcome home, American.’

In the corner of the room, half shielded by the door, stood La Huesuda, bony as ever. She had a snapped-off chair-leg in one hand. Her mouth tipped sharply upwards at the edges and her thin nose glistened. Far from showing any signs of guilt, she seemed to have found some benefit in his appearance, seemed to be relishing the fact that he had caught them in the act.