Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

‘It’s a difficult business.’ The doctor was bending over Wilson’s foot, binding the ankle in tight bands of gauze. ‘The soil in this region is a soft, wet clay. Very unstable. Even with heavy timbering it can collapse.’ He began to apply plaster of Paris to the gauze. ‘But you, as a prospector, would have a better understanding than most of the perils involved.’

‘I do most of my work on the surface,’ Wilson said. ‘I have come to mistrust tunnels.’

‘Even so, I’m sure that you have witnessed many accidents.’

Though Wilson had not, in fact, witnessed even a single accident, it seemed ungrateful, in the circumstances, to deny it. Accordingly, he recalled an incident where a man had fallen thirteen hundred feet to his death after being overpowered by a noxious gas. It had happened in Nevada.

‘There,’ the doctor said. ‘You see?’

Wilson lay motionless, content with the silence and the soothing coolness of the marble against his forearms and the back of his head. It did not seem to him that he had lied. He could still remember reading the article in the Illustrated News. The accident had been described in such a vivid and realistic style that he did honestly feel as if he had been there.

While the plaster dried, the doctor left the room, returning some minutes later with a pair of wooden crutches.

‘These will help you to move about,’ he said, ‘though I suspect you’ll find small spaces difficult.’

‘Small spaces?’ Wilson peered at the doctor over his chest.

‘Balconies, for example,’ the doctor said. He handed the crutches to Wilson, his lips tightening into a furtive smile.

The hospital clock was striking midday when the two men left the building. They stood on the south veranda looking at the town below. The houses had roofs made from sheets of shining tin. The streets looked swept. But mesquite and ocotillo were beginning to disrupt the symmetry, and away to the east, where the mountains lifted steeply against the sky, Wilson could see a number of shanty dwellings pieced together out of driftwood, scrap metal, wild flag.

His eyes shifted east, towards the waterfront. The ship that he had noticed earlier was now docking in the harbour. It was a freighter, out of Le Havre. You saw ships like it in every port from Seattle to New Orleans, carrying timber, grain or fruit. Three masts, a funnel that could use some paint, engines of low power. An ocean tramp.

He watched the hawsers fly from the deck to the quay, where they were deftly looped through heavy iron rings. Coal barges were already nudging against the starboard bow. It did not look as if the ship would be in Santa Sofía for long.

‘Do you know, Monsieur,’ the doctor said, ‘what is the cargo of that vessel?’

Wilson did not.

‘It’s a church.’

‘A church?’

The doctor’s smile broadened, but he chose not to elaborate. He too, it seemed, would have his mysteries.

‘I’m afraid I must leave you,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘I have other patients to attend to.’

‘You’ve been very kind,’ Wilson said. ‘What do I owe you?’

The doctor raised his hand in front of him, palms outwards, and turned his head away.

‘When you find your gold,’ he said, ‘then perhaps one small, how do you say,’ and he rolled his forefinger against the inside of his thumb and held it up.

Wilson could just see the sky through the gap. ‘Nugget?’

‘Yes.’ The doctor beamed. ‘Nugget.’

‘You’ve got yourself a deal,’ Wilson said.

He had reached town a month before, stone-broke and weak as a deadwood fence, his face buried in his mule’s coarse mane, and all his tools hanging off her flanks and chinking like a kitchen in an earthquake. The sun stamped on the back of his neck, his shoulderblades, his hat. When he raised his head he saw two brown trains on the beach, waves rustling against their wheels, and thought he must be tumbling into madness. Then buildings appeared. Workshops, furnaces. A railway line. Smoke climbed from a tall brick chimney. Sawblades poured gold on to a soil floor. He pinched his eyes. A woman was standing on the road, her feet spread wide in the dust, as if she were about to draw a gun on him. That was all he needed.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

Her name was Mama Vum Buá.

She stared at him. ‘You want breakfast?’

What he wanted was water.

‘No water,’ she said. ‘We got coffee.’

He took the coffee. You did not argue with Mama Vum Buá.

She was a Yaqui Indian, from the province of Sonora on the mainland, but sometime during the previous century the pure blood of her family had been corrupted by a renegade Jesuit priest. Her eyes were not brown, as you might have expected. They were a startling cobalt-blue. She was ashamed of the colour — it set her apart from her people, whom she loved — and she found her contempt for anything foreign almost impossible to conceal, especially if it involved religion too. There was an old withered quince tree in the yard behind her restaurant. ‘It was planted by some missionary,’ she would hiss. ‘No wonder it didn’t bear no goddam fruit.’

Like many Indians in Santa Sofia, she wore copper rings on her fingers and her thumbs: twelve of them — one for every child she had conceived, living and dead. She had strung a handful of bronze Mulege pearls on a length of catgut and fastened it around her neck. She arranged her hair in the traditional Yaqui style, three braids coiled on her head, and she always appeared in the same dress, yellow with red flowers, though it had been washed in salt water so many times that the colours had faded to cream and pink. She chewed quids of some fiery local root that stained her gums and palate red, and when she smiled, which was not often, she always smiled out of the right side of her mouth. Wilson had taken to her instantly, her belligerent manner, the hiss and rumble of her speech. No morning was complete until he had breakfasted at Mama Vum Buá’s place.

It was almost one by the time he limped into her yard. He laid his crutches on the ground and sat himself down at his usual table in the shade. Three Indians in cloaks stared blankly at his foot. A few minutes passed. At last the Señora emerged from the darkness of her kitchen. She stood in the sunlight, blinking, fists on her hips. When she saw Wilson, she hawked and spat. A rope of red liquid looped through the air towards him, landing in the dust close by.

‘You’re late this morning.’

‘I had an accident — ’

‘You fell off a balcony. I know.’

‘It just collapsed. I didn’t — ’

‘In your underwear. You want eggs?’

Smiling, he lit the butt of a cigar and aimed the glowing tip at the harbour. ‘They say there’s a church on that ship.’

She tilted her head sideways, as if listening for hymns or prayers or something that might give the church away — but there was only the clank of the conveyor belt and the dull whining of flies in the midday heat. She let her breath out fast and spat into the dust so hard it bounced.

‘You want tortillas?’

He nodded.

‘Coffee?’

‘Yes.’

Wilson heard voices chattering behind him. He looked round. Six of the Vum Buá girls were waiting by the date palm, two of them naked but for twenty-pound flour-sacks with holes for arms. One was swamped by a grown woman’s dress; it wrapped around her twice and trailed in the dirt. Another held a dead fish by the tail.

Mama Vum Buá had eight daughters, none of whom had yet reached womanhood. They had dark eyes and funny, jagged teeth, and their black hair was tied back with dried kelp or fishing twine or bits of frayed rope. They had Indian names that were so long and unpronounceable that he had christened them First, Second, Third, etc., according to their height. Every time he sat down to his breakfast, they would sidle up and twist themselves around the nearest trees or chairs like ribbons, their eyes all wide and shiny. Sometimes he would entertain them with coin tricks he had picked up from a retired gunslinger in El Paso. Other times he would bring his guitar along. While he waited for his coffee to cool he would sing them songs in his tuneless voice, songs about broken hearts and America and fields of gold. Since they could not understand the words, it did not matter what he sang about, though he would never sing anything that contained obscenities. This morning he planned to tell them about a man who was so dumb that he tried to leave the second floor of a house without using the stairs. He could already hear their ancient, cracked laughter as he traced his descent in the air with his hand.