Air and Fire (30 page)

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.

Two days later the sea appeared, some ten miles to the east. He recognised the country now, a ridge, a canyon, another ridge, the folds in the land that lay to the south of Santa Sofía. He tried to calculate how long it had been since he had left the town. He thought it must be about ten days.

He approached through Montoya's domain, passing the ranch, the soldiers' garrison, the cemetery, and stood at last above the narrow valley that was El Pueblo. A few clouds fanned out against the sky, white wing-feathers, bones refined by countless tides. The town lay below, flat and tawdry, crushed by heat.

His father had stood as he was standing now, on a hill to the east of San Francisco, and looked down at the tents pitched in the meadows, streets of painted wooden houses, the spilled silver of the harbour. The city had changed and grown in the years that he had been away. San
Francisco, 1879. A wry smile bent across his father's lips. He had come face to face with an old adversary.

Though it would hurt him, Wilson let the memory run. When they arrived outside the small house on Piano Street, his mother would not let them in. Neither of them. She stood on the threshold, her hair still smooth against her skull, but grey, her eyes dull, as if she had spent her days in pain. But her grip on the door betrayed no weakness of any kind.

‘What do you want?' She was talking to her husband for the first time in seven years.

‘Constance,' he said. ‘I'm home.' The habit of a spring in his heels, but no power there, no conviction. Just one twang, and then silence.

She shook her head. Her smile was bitter as the taste of acorn bread. She had just realised the meaning of her name, the irony of it. The joke had been on her throughout her life. Now it was on him.

‘You've got a home someplace, maybe,' she said, ‘but this ain't it.'

‘Constance – '

She rounded on Wilson. ‘The same goes for you.'

‘But I did like you said. I brought him back.'

‘It don't take five years to bring somebody back.'

‘I had to find him first.'

‘You found him,' she said, ‘then you stayed with him.' It was unreasonable, what she was saying, but there was truth in it.

‘Constance – ' His father had shuffled forwards.

‘No,' she said. ‘It's too late.' The door closed in their faces and they heard the shooting of bolts.

‘Well, I'll be damned.' Arthur Pharaoh turned this way and that on the stoop, not unlike a cat settling. But there would be no rest for him, not now. ‘Well, I'll be damned,' he said again.

Then they walked back down the street and booked into a traveller's hotel.

It was the first time that Arthur Pharaoh had ever left the house on Piano Street because he had no other choice. It had taken him years to summon up the courage to go home and face his wife. All that apprehension, all those years – for what? His surprise converted into anger. ‘I'll be
damned
' He was angry as he walked away that morning. At being thwarted. At being denied the chance to own his life, with all its wrongdoing, all its shame. At the same time there was part of him that could not help but feel relieved. He had been spared the reckoning; he
could continue as before. By nightfall he had come full circle, seeing the rejection as a kind of triumph. In their hotel room, as Wilson lay down to sleep, his father gave him a pointed look, as if he had known all along that going back would serve no useful purpose. The next morning, they left for Virginia City. His father did not know it then, but he would never see his home again. Wilson did not want to dwell on that. He turned his eyes back to the seat of his own pain, the town that lay sweltering below.

His breathing quickened as he saw the spire lifting above the rooftops, sharp and pale-red, and his relief was also the slow cracking of his heart. Was the church finished? Had she gone? He no longer knew the difference between what he was hoping for and what he dreaded. Then he noticed scaffolding at the far end of the building. The roof still needed work. He whistled to his mule and flicked his hat across her rump. Her ears tilted gamely forwards. Together, they started on the downward path.

It was shortly after noon. Only the shuffle of their boots and hoofs, the jingle of the reins, to break into the silence. He passed a woman dozing on her porch, a silver edge to her jaw, her face shining like a picture under glass. On the corner of Avenida Aljez the seeds on the trees had shrivelled into black half-moons.

He noticed smoke rising in a trickle from the bakery. It was just about the only thing moving. It was also strange. Jesús never baked during the afternoon. He must be on to something.

Wilson paused in the doorway. Jesús was stooping over his oven, a few sticks of straw in his fist. He whipped the door open, threw the straw inside. It flared red, and then withered, turning to cinders in an instant.

‘Jesús?'

‘Well, well.' Jesús stood up. ‘You're back.'

‘Could you spare me some water?'

Jesús pointed to an earthen pot behind the door. Wilson removed the lid and scooped the water up in both hands. No words could describe the taste of cool fresh water after two weeks in the desert. He drank three handfuls and stood back, gasping.

‘Good trip?' Jesús asked.

‘I wouldn't call it good exactly.'

‘No gold then.'

‘None.'

Jesús swept the straw cinders from the floor of his oven and shut the door. Tve been experimenting with temperature.'

Wilson sat down on a sack of flour and prepared himself for another lecture. He would have, listened to a lecture on anything right then. It was just such a blessing to take the weight off his blistered feet, to lean against a wall, to stretch his legs out in front of him.

‘See, what you're looking for is a heat that's flexible,' Jesús began, ‘a kind of spring in the oven. You've got to raise the temperature, hold it steady for a few minutes, and then relax it. It's all in the timing.'

Wilson nodded.

‘If your heat's achieved too fast,' Jesús explained, ‘and the oven gets too hot, then you burn your bread – '

‘I've seen that,' Wilson said. ‘I've even eaten it.'

‘– but if your heat's sluggish and the oven isn't hot enough, you don't kill the yeast.' Jesús was pacing the stone floor of the bakery, his shoulders hunched, his pale hands moving in the air. They seemed to summon all Wilson's fatigue. He could feel his eyelids dropping.

‘Your dough rises and rises. Then, suddenly –
plof!
and one hand sprang open, ‘it collapses. What you pull out of the oven is an embarrassment. Flat as a pancake, hardly bread at all. Three days in a row I baked flat bread. I hadn't realised.'

The last thing Wilson heard as his head fell forwards on his chest was the beginning of a digression into the subject of moisture, something about a brick wrapped in a damp cloth, something about a bowl of water. When he woke, Jesús was working at his kneading-trough, the muscles bulging in his heavy calves as he trod up and down. The day had darkened in the doorway.

‘That was very interesting, Jesús,' Wilson said. ‘'Specially that bit about the brick.'

Jesús looked up, his feet still marching in the dough.

‘You don't understand the first thing about bread. You've spent too much time in the desert,' he said, ‘addling your brains.'

Suzanne could not bear to look at any part of the sky. It stretched above the town, taut and brilliant, the sun a core of brightness at the centre. Everything in the house was hot to the touch: the chairs, the walls, the plates – even the clothes that Imelda had laid out for her that morning. There seemed to be no escaping it. She could only think of sleeping under the fan as a way to pass the hours.

Then, towards eleven, Montoya's carriage drew up outside. It was driven by the same man as usual, uniformed and taciturn, his body trussed with ammunition-belts. She had left the house almost before she knew it – the heat took the decision for her – and was immediately rewarded with a breeze as the carriage moved off down the street. A hot breeze, true – but any breeze was better than none. She began to try and imagine what a cruise in a submarine would be like. Under the water, she thought. Away from the sun. She was already smiling, in anticipation. It would be cool under the water. It might even be cold, like winter. It was the first time she could remember wanting to be cold, the first time she had ever thought of a shiver as a luxury.

The waterfront was crowded with children, all hoping for a glimpse of the submarine. They were being kept at a distance by a number of Montoya's soldiers. When they saw Suzanne, though, they clamoured round her, hands opening and closing like sea anemones. She gave them lemon bonbons and some worthless French coins. Fights broke out. Her driver had to scatter them, his whip curling and snapping in the air above their heads.

She was ushered through the military cordon and out along the south quay to where the submarine lay moored. It was the strangest machine. Built from curving iron plates, dark-green, the shape of a cigar. ‘PACIFIC PEARL COMPANY' had been painted along one side, but the white letters had peeled, flaked away, and the word ‘PACIFIC' was half gone. Montoya stood inside what resembled a funnel, only the
top half of his body visible. She called down to him. He glanced round. All his features seemed to leap.

‘I didn't think that you would come,' he said.

She watched him climb out of the submarine and mount the stone steps to the quay. He wore white, a simple, high-buttoning jacket and a pair of ducks; his head was bare. He looked young and efficient. You would never have thought he was the kind of man who would shoot a horse for no reason.

He stood in front of her, his eyes shining, yet forlorn. Any hopes he may have had were always haunted by a fear of impending disappointment.

‘Everything's ready,' he said.

He led her down the steps and on to the curving outer shell. The heels of her boots rang on the metal.

‘And it works?' she said.

‘So they tell me.'

She climbed backwards down a vertical ladder and found herself in a narrow metal chamber. Montoya followed, his shoes clicking on the rungs, the soles, she noticed, hardly worn. He fastened the hatchway after him by spinning a wheel that looked like part of a bicycle. Light filtered down, conducted by two tiers of glass eyes. The chamber had been painted grey, but the walls bristled with levers and faucets and winches, and they were all bright-red, the colour of his uniform. She smiled to herself.

A Mexican ducked through a steel doorway and asked Montoya a question. Montoya gave him a curt nod, then turned to her.

‘That's one of the crew,' he said. ‘We have six men on board. Four to drive the propellor-shaft, one to control the pumps and valves, and one to navigate.'

He guided her forwards, into the nose of the craft, a cramped space with two folding leather seats bolted to the floor and a single round window, about a foot in diameter, that looked straight ahead. This was the observation room, he told her. While he went aft to issue orders to the crew, she took her place on one of the folding seats. In the window she could see the water of the harbour, almost on a level with her eyes. A tremor ran through her as she realised that they would soon be travelling beneath the surface.