Beyond the Horizon (3 page)

‘No hay razón de resistir,' the stranger said. He smiled kindly and extended his hand to the woman. ‘Este es el diseño general del universe. No hay nada más para usted.'

The woman sniffled, realized whatever the stranger meant, he would ultimately be correct. ‘Por favor,' she said. ‘Hágalo rápidamente.'

Her request was simple and he would oblige. Then he told her it would all happen in due course.

The plains went on for some time. The man rode the mule through the nighttime hours as he said he would do. During the day he draped his shirt over his face for shade and slept. He awoke in the evening when the silken purpled rays of the sun provided just enough light to study his maps. He ate a handful of meal and drank from his canteen and waited for the stars to emerge from the darkness.

First the North Star flickered into existence where the dusk met the land. Low on the opposite horizon the Hydra snaked across the sky. Mighty Ursa Major rotated in the heavens. The man rode without regard for any certain destination, his gaze set far out into the great nothingness beyond.

The stranger did as she had asked and killed her quickly. He performed the deed using a metal band pulled from the edge of a wagon wheel. He'd taken a rock and hammered the edge into a jagged blade, teeth of metal forming wherever the impact landed. While the woman waited, she wet herself. The metal band proved a clumsy tool, never intended for this use. In the end the stranger made three blows—two to the woman's head and one to her torso, taking care not to strike the womb—and then she was
dead.

The stranger performed the task without ceremony, carrying out the act as silently as the woman received it. He collected the stray parts of her body—the hand she'd futilely raised to deflect the first blow, the fragment of skull bone with the scalp still attached. He bundled the vestiges together in her dress and tied the skirt at the top and bottom. Since she was small he could easily carry the makeshift sack into his now finished abode. The flat rock he'd slaughtered her on lay covered with blood and feces. He studied the skies and figured it would rain soon enough and clean the spot. Time now became important. The fetus would only live on for a few more minutes.

He went to the inner chamber and lifted a wooden door to the tunnel he'd bored down into the earth. Roping the sack to his waist, he began to crawl—this tunnel plumbed deep at a steep angle and then fell nearly straight down. Siftings of dirt fell as he crawled, dragging the body behind him. He went deeper, until the loose dirt packed harder and morphed into clay. Water seeped from all sides of the tunnel. Gravity and the angle of the tunnel caused the sack containing the body to fall against the stranger. At once he became soaked with blood, water and urine. He scraped his hands against the rocks, the fissures of the labyrinth winding their way through complete darkness. He came to the end of the tunnel.

The way into the tunnel seemed to no longer exist. He crouched low in what he suspected was a pool of spring water. He placed a hand on his bundle and still felt the baby stirring, kicking. Perhaps the way down here had collapsed. Or maybe his route had become so circuitous no light could meander its way to these depths.

‘Este es un lugar bueno para ser sepultado,' he said. Finally, the baby moved no more. Then he tried to stand, but did not have enough clearance. He began laughing and let the echoes resound throughout the chambers within the earth, channeling and mapping out the landscape beneath the land above. He laughed louder at the sound of his own mania and the noise amplified to deafening levels. The rocks began to shake and wisps of dirt crumbled from between the cracks of stone. A rumbling louder than any laughter resonated from deeper than any charted cavern of the earth's bowels.

Several days out the man saw a troupe of men. Distant things. It was daytime now and he readied himself for sleep. The men on the horizon corkscrewed their way through the grasses and up the slight gradient to where the man pitched camp. Though they remained otiose things, he could see one of them waved his hand. The man set down his meal of dried grains and mush and searched in the saddlebags for his
shiv.

‘You there,' the distant figure called. Again he waved his
arm.

Uncertain of how to return the call, the man simply waved his
arm.

There were three men in the troupe—each dressed in a uniform that might have once looked regal.

‘Had injuns attack our division,' the man with ropes around his shoulder said. He was an officer. ‘Lost most of my men. Apaches—thats the kind of injun we're talkin about.'

The man shook his head. ‘Caint say I ever heard of
em.'

The two other officers exchanged a look. ‘You aint never heard of the Apache?'

‘No.'

‘You live out here an you aint never heard of the Apache?'

‘Caint say I have.'

All three men laughed heartily.

‘Dont see whats funny,' the man
said.

‘You must be bout twenty years old,' the officer said. ‘Now I'd hand over my entire army paycheck to have your kind of stupidity.'

The two other soldiers bellowed laughter in agreement. When the man did not join in their laughter, they redoubled their glee at the man's ignorance.

The man took out his shiv and brandished it at the officer. ‘Go on now,' he said. ‘You just settin here takin up my time and funnin me. Get out of here.'

But the display the man made only caused further wails of laughter. The officer pulled a saber from his waistband and waved it in the air. ‘I'm a goddamned grizzled uncle-dad,' he hollered. ‘I smell bad enough even the redskin niggers leave me lone.'

The other two men hooted and took out a hatchet and a bayonet respectively.

‘Put that shank away, boy,' the officer said, turning suddenly savage. ‘Hate to chop you up like I did to the niggers we took prisoner.'

Without hesitation, the man slid the shiv into the side of his boot. ‘Would appreciate it if you fellas got a move along. I'm restin up so I's can travel through the night.'

‘That
so?'

‘It is,' the man said. ‘Figure you fellas are probably lookin to head back to your fort.'

The officer snorted. ‘Why'd we do a fool thing like that?'

The other two soldiers nodded in agreement. One took a swig from his canteen. ‘Got a whole different set of skills,' one said. ‘Might as well be dead for all the army knows.'

‘You gonna just do what—steal an kill?'

‘Whatever makes a livin.'

‘You gonna kill
me?'

All three of the men exchanged glances casually. The one's gaze fixated on the mule. The man's hand began sliding back down his leg, toward the shiv in his
boot.

‘Afraid you got nothin even worth killin you for,' the officer
said.

‘Maybe you'll learn what an Apache looks like,' the other one
said.

‘Be the last thing you learn,' the third
said.

With that the three men stood up and mounted their horses. ‘Thanks for the conversation, stranger,' the officer said. He tipped his hat and they rode
on.

The man watched the soldiers go until they became lost in the shifting grasses of the plains. Unnerved by the visit, the man decided he could not sleep and he packed up his gear and began riding again.

Riding during the day required a different type of navigation than at night. Instead of familiarizing himself with the stars, he had to know the path of the sun, the time of day. Navigation by the sun consisted of knowing time and space. To travel westward as he was, he needed to travel away from the sun in the morning. At noon he would be wise to stop for rest as it was the hottest time of day and the sun cast shadows without direction. Once the sun canted past the noontime peak, he would progress toward
it.

These few lessons were what he learned from his father.

‘Maps can be wrong,' his father said. ‘Men draw em up, make money on
em.'

He remembered he asked his father why any man would want to make a map poorly. But this angered his father, being interrupted. Often he spoke just to hear himself talk. ‘Why do you think?' he asked. Now the boy stayed silent. ‘How they gonna sell the next one, if this map is the best?' He shook his head. Normally when he became this upset, he said he should have left the boy with his mother, that loose bitch with crotch
rot.

His father leaned on the rail of the boarding house balcony, suddenly calm again. He watched the waves roll in and out, smelled the air. ‘Lotta sailors now trust the maps,' his father said. ‘They dont know how to gauge the sun. They dont know bout seabirds an what they mean. Lotta capns wont take me on cause I dont read maps—or anything really. Worse thing we ever done was come to shore.'

And it was true. Life at sea made for easier living than this place where they ended up. At least when they moved on the sea. The Sargasso told another story all together. ‘Cmon boy,' his father said. ‘Time to get some shut
eye.'

The boy's hands gripped the railing. Far off in the village streets he heard laughter and strange music.

For nearly a whole day the man rode with occasional breaks to water his mule at streams. He rode into the night. Though sore in buttocks from the journey, he pressed on, his head drooping every now and again with slumber. He jerked his head back up. Moonlight, brilliant and glittering, lit a path before him. He thought to look around, study the far stretches of darkness pulled out in every direction. But manmade light, there was
none.

His thoughts wandered. He imagined his woman back at the hovel, wondered if she'd given birth yet. He thought about his son. In his mind he became certain now that the stranger must have been correct, it would be a son. He pictured her cradling the baby in the crook of her arm, singing those listless songs in her foreign tongue. Thoughts of the stranger, how he tended to her, infiltrated the periphery of his fantasy. First he imagined the stranger holding the baby, smiling at his wife, speaking to her as he had that one time. He would say things to her like his father used to say to the women at the wharfside houses.

Then he imagined the stranger and his woman in bed together, her still loosed from birth, but wanton just the same. Somewhere in the hovel the baby cried while they fornicated.

The man shook his head, as if the thoughts could be flung right out into the darkness around him. In doing so, a memory took their place. He remembered his father's breath, hot with wharf house grog, telling him to watch.

His father stood naked over the bed. His body hewed lean, tanned all. Stray hairs and scars marred his
skin.

‘You want him here?' the woman asked. She lay in the bed next to the boy. She was naked
too.

‘Needs to watch,' his father said. ‘Needs to see a man give it to a woman.'

The hired woman craned her head around to look at the boy. He'd drawn himself up against the wall, pulling his legs to his chest.

‘Aint a thing to be scared about,' she said. And as she said this, his father pulled her leg to the side and inserted himself. The woman's brow flinched and she groaned.

The boy looked out the window by the bed, which began to rock rhythmically.

‘Hey,' his father said. He snapped his fingers to draw the boy's attention. ‘Keep watchin. This is how men do
it.'

When the man awoke, the daytime returned. His mule had stopped to graze on some reed grass by a spring. The man gauged the sun, guessed it to be late morning. If he had been dreaming, the thoughts were a fog now. He dismounted the mule and squatted by the spring, refilled his canteens. The chaff meal ran low, maybe another two days' worth.

He made a half-hearted attempt to forage something, but found nothing here. He looked out behind him, half expecting to see back as far as the hovel. But there was nothing. He turned his back to the sun and looked ahead. Faint and jagged, farther out than the rest of the land before him, lay the mountains.

The stranger ate dinner with the troupe of soldiers. He looked over the insignia on the officer's uniform, looked at the faded patch of fabric where a name used to be embroidered. The two other soldiers sat on a length of driftwood, eating from their mess
kits.

‘Want to thank you for the dinner, the kindness,' the stranger
said.

‘Cant let a man go hungry out here on the plains,' the officer said. He didnt make eye contact when he said this. He looked at the boots the stranger wore, looked at the roped clumps of black hair on the stranger's
head.

‘Good for you theres not a whole lot of men in these parts then,' the stranger
said.

The officer poured both him and the stranger cups of coffee. The two soldiers declined theirs. ‘Hot if you want it,' the officer said setting the kettle on the ground by the
fire.

‘Run into many men?' the stranger asked.

‘Few, yeah. Mostly the desperate type.'

‘That
so?'

‘Some men with no business bein out here like they
is.'

The stranger raised his eyebrows. ‘And what business is it that should keep a man at home?'

The soldiers on the driftwood tended to their weapons, conversed between themselves.

‘Ran into a fella,' the officer said. ‘Never heard of an Apache.'

‘Is that right?'

‘God's honest truth, right boys?'

The two soldiers paused their conversation long enough to grunt in agreement.

‘And what business do you have out here, in these parts?' the stranger asked.

This question caused all three men to give the stranger a hard stare.

‘We're soldiers, infantry,' the officer
said.

‘But youre not going back,' the stranger said. ‘To your fort, I mean.'

‘No,' the officer said. ‘Cant rightly say we
are.'

The stranger looked at the two companions, each sharpening his weapon. He studied the smaller of the two men. A skittish sort, the man used a flat stone to rub the face of a hatchet.

‘Youre scalping,' the stranger
said.

The officer snorted, slurped at his cup of coffee. ‘Doin whatever pays, whatever keeps us goin.'

The stranger wrapped his hands around the tin cup, letting the warmth flood through them. He looked once at each of the men before addressing the smallest. He smirked. ‘Ik zal je vermoorden duren,' he
said.

The officer nearly spat out his coffee. ‘What in the hell'd you
say?'

The stranger stayed calm. Men usually became worked up when he spoke a native tongue to them. But this younger soldier, the one with the hatchet, he understood.

‘Youre a fur trapper,' he said to the soldier. ‘Een bonten handelaar. Started out in the sylvania country other side of the Mississippi. Never fought in any war though. Thats why your uniform is so ill-fitting.' The stranger closed his eyes. ‘You took the clothes off a dead man so you could reap all the army benefits.'

‘Hold on here,' the other soldier said. The stranger silenced him by raising his hand. He addressed the interrupting party directly. ‘Youve had these thoughts yourself, sometimes when your comrade in arms mispronounces a word, when he stays silent while you and your officer here are laughing at a turn of phrase.'

The officer slurped at his coffee, studied the soldier in question over the edge of his cup. Still, the stranger kept speaking, this time rotating his oration between all three men in his audience. ‘You'll say I'm making this all up. And I am. The story never existed until I put it into your head. Doesnt make it any less true.'

He sipped at his coffee. The soldiers exchanged glances. The officer spoke. ‘You of any value?' he asked the stranger.

‘You saw me walking,' the stranger said. ‘No horse to speak of, no possessions.' He looked at the soldier with the hatchet again. ‘Ah, maar de bonten handelaar. How fitting.'

The soldier stopped sharpening his blade, letting the rock fall into the grasses. He gripped the stock of the hatchet. The other soldier thumbed the edge of his knife.

‘Whats that mean—
how fitting
?' the officer asked.

The stranger laughed, gulped down the last of the coffee. ‘You all are going to cut the scalp right off my head, claim it as an Apache's. Youve been eyeing my hair since I sat down. My value to you is as a corpse.'

The officer gave the soldiers a nod and the one with the hatchet lunged at the stranger. But the stranger pulled out a shank of his own, a scrap of metal. It cut the man across his bicep. Flesh flapped limp and the arm fell deadened to the man's side. He howled in agony. The stranger seized up the hatchet and in one broad stroke split the other soldier's skull from one orbital cavity to the next. He whirled around, missing a jab from the officer's sword. Two more hacks and the officer lay broken in the grass.

The stranger squatted by the officer's corpse and undressed him, pulling the uniform jacket and trousers from the body. He stuffed the trouser legs into the sleeves of the jacket and tied the clothes around his waist. Then he stood
up.

The fur trapper tried crawling away, his arm with the cloth and muscle and bone all unfolding. He panted. The stranger sauntered
over.

‘How far ahead is the man who hasnt seen an Apache?'