Beyond the Horizon (20 page)

‘Nro,' the commandante admitted in yet another language.

‘You thought you
did.'

The commandante nodded. The two men sauntered toward each other, both moving disjointedly—one because of his armor, both from age. When they came close enough the commandante jabbed the knife at the Indian and the blade glanced off the arm bone. The Indian countered by striking a blow to the head with his skeleton fist. The force was enough to break the bones free of the lanyards. The commandante tried to stab the Indian between the ribs, but lodged the blade into the ribs of the armor. The Chief brought the brick down on the commandante's face and slaked the flesh clean from his cheekbone, exposing most of the ball of his eye. Whatever noise the commandante made it was not a scream, nor was it a moan—it was something in between. The Chief struck him again; this time a more direct blow. He felt the bone of the skull give and turn mushy. The commandante's body began to shake and his one good eye spun around.

Then the Indian realized that the commandante's body was not the only thing shaking. The ground rumbled. From inside the walls of the fort a plume of smoke rose up. The scaffolding around the mine lift collapsed.

‘Querido dues,' the Chief cursed. He looked down on the commandante. What was left of his mouth turned up in a smile. The Chief struck a third blow and killed the commandante.

Deep in the mine the stranger had been sleeping as he had for decades now. He lay recumbent in his bed of dynamite, thinking of the man. He had lived the entirety of the man's existence in his head and replayed his favorite parts of the man's life. He recalled how the man lay next to the woman, listening to her whisper in her sleep, watching her brow twitch and her limbs deftly move, her eyelids fluttering as if she threatened to retreat from the dream. In his mind the man tried to imagine what she was dreaming, if she was thinking of him. She wasnt of course.

Another memory: the woman undressed by the stream. The man had taken her there as he was afraid to leave her alone. At first the fear was that she might run away. Then, after some time, the fear of her leaving under duress became the mounting anxiety. They spent their days with each other. When the man walked to the stream, she walked with him, her hands clasped under her protruding belly.

‘This here,' the man said, pointing to the slough. ‘This was where I decided this was a good nuff place to settle. I went to the top a that hill there and looked out in all directions. Didnt see nothing cept grass. Like bein out on the ocean.'

The woman let her fingers slide apart, leaving only her right hand under the womb. She grabbed the man's hand and laced her fingers into his. The man started for a moment, thinking she might be trying to convey something urgent. He looked at her, but she kept her gaze downcast and a dimple welled in her cheek.

‘It's like the ocean,' the man said again. ‘Cept here you can walk on the water. Aint no place for you to get stuck, caint fall
in.'

They came to the stream's edge and the woman let his hand go. He stood dumbfounded for a moment, watching her wade shin deep into the water. She bent over and pulled out some pebbles, examined them in the sun. The man went to the mule and untethered the beast from one of the saplings. When he turned around, the woman pulled her tunic over her head. She stood completely naked in the creek, cupping water and washing her body. She hummed.

As some people do in confusing situations, the man froze. She lifted her hair back, exposing the nape of her neck. It occurred to the man that this was a part of her he had never seen. Strangely enough, he did not think this of her breasts, full and sagging, the nipples brown. Nor did this thought occur when he saw her rub her sex with handfuls of water.

After she washed, she put the tunic back on and walked toward their hovel. The man followed, running to catch up with her. He nicked his ankle on some driftwood and the woman patched his wound that evening, kissing the mark after the blood had dried.

The couple weeks that followed were filled with more touching and kissing. The man eventually placed his mouth on hers. As he was unsure what to do, she took over, her tongue roving over his teeth and tongue. She whispered to him in her strange language, her eyes avoiding
his.

The man said he loved her
too.

‘Usted me puede tener si desea,' the woman said. She took the man's hand and moved it over her body, down under the womb and between her
legs.

The man pulled his hand away. He was shaking. ‘Whats gotten you riled up?' he asked. ‘We caint do that with a baby in there.'

‘Es fino,' the woman assured him. ‘Metélo. No le va a causar daño al bebé—lo he hecho antes.'

The man shook his head. ‘Dont want to be one a your misters. I wanna be your husband. We could raise that baby like it was ours—yours and mine.' He didnt know what else to say, if the woman even understood what he said. He threw the blanket door aside and went outside to look at the stars. The woman followed. The lantern within their hovel illuminated the structure. It could be seen from a dozen miles
away.

It was in the middle of this memory that the men in the mine struck the stranger's dynamite and blew him back into existence and buried themselves alive.

The man tried to open his eyes, but found it too difficult. The weight on his chest made breathing a chore enough. He parted his mouth and inhaled, but loose granules of dirt flooded his mouth. He coughed and pain shot through his ribs, seemed to stab at his backbone. For a few moments he concentrated solely on breathing—inhaling through his nose, though one nostril was packed with dirt, and exhaling through his mouth. After a few breaths he moved his arms. He had some mobility. With all the strength he had left he shoved at the weight on his chest and felt it give way. He kicked his feet and freed himself from the immediate imprisonment.

It was completely dark. In this darkness, the quiet of this place, the man wondered if he had died. Having never pondered what comes after death, this seemed plausible enough. Those who die become subducted into the earth. But how doubtful we are when it comes to a life after this one. As he lay contemplating his death, the man's hands roved over his body, inspecting the rash of wounds he sustained during the implosion. A gash ran from his shoulder blade to his backbone. The little finger on his left hand was broken. One of his ears was half torn from his
head.

He began to crawl. It made no difference whether he was living or dead. Either fate would suffice. Indeed though, the man was alive. Little did he know just exactly where he was in relation to the rest of the world. The labyrinth of tunnels the miners had constructed spread out under the fort like tree roots that have a farther reach than the branches have above ground. At this moment, fifteen hundred feet above him, a wall of the fort, now on unsteady ground, had collapsed, spilling out the loose fill. No more than a thousand feet from there the Indian Chief and three of his tribesmen hunched over the corpse of the commandante. A vengeance that stews over the course of a lifetime is always unfulfilling. Killing the stranger was no different.

The Chief turned to a tribesman and ordered him to cut the commandante's hands off. Cut up his entire body, the Chief said. Scatter the pieces, cook some pieces and feed others to the vultures. Burn his uniform and hair. Grind his teeth with a mortar until they are nothing but flour. No sooner had he given the command when a tribesman grabbed the Chief by the arm. He pointed out across the dry open ground, past where smoke and dust swirled in dirt devils. A man approached on a vector not from the fort, not from the village in the cliff. He was a ghostly white. The Chief took the dagger from the commandante's hand and began walking toward this new stranger. The tribesmen followed at a
trot.

‘You there!' the Chief shouted. The man on the horizon kept walking toward him without regard for the Chief's words. Some soldiers gathered at the fallen portion of the wall and readied themselves. But neither the approaching stranger nor the Indian paid them any
mind.

The stranger stepped over a body, sidestepped a pile of burning dung. As he drew nearer, the Chief could see this stranger's skin was without any color. What clothes he had looked to rot right off his body. The tribesman in the stovepipe hat took off in a sprint toward the stranger, bringing his hatchet over his head. The other tribesmen followed. The stranger—the Chief knew at once that it was him in the flesh—seized the Indian by the wrist and grabbed the hatchet. He brought his elbow into the back of the Indian's head and used the blunt end of the hatchet to crack the next Indian's skull. He ducked the spear the third Indian threw and launched the hatchet at the retreating tribesman. The blade buried in the Indian's back and he fell
dead.

Only the Chief was left. The stranger kept approaching; he yanked the hatchet out of the back of the Indian as he passed. The soldiers at the fort watched these figures, small against the backdrop of the desert land and the rubble of the village, obscured by wafts of yellow smoke.

‘Didnt figure on it happening this way,' the stranger said. He came close enough for the Chief to see the blood veins tracing blue lines through his face. This was him—the stranger of the Chief's youth. His hair was longer and darker, his skin fairer. The stranger smiled so his teeth showed. ‘How'd it feel to kill
me?'

The Chief could not stand any longer; he sat on the ground and stared out past the stranger, past the fort. ‘Felt the same as any other of the million men I killed,' the Chief finally
said.

‘Good to know,' the stranger said. ‘I figured I would have to be the one to do it when the time came.' In the short time the stranger had been out of his mine, the sun had taken a toll on his skin, reddening it into blisters, popping and glistening now. ‘Did you follow the man I sent out this
way?'

The Chief nodded once, the tincture of the skullcap reflecting the sun overhead.

The stranger said he figured it was so, said time was a cruel thing. ‘Spend a whole lifetime pursuing a thing constructed in your dreams,' he scoffed. He gestured with his fingers like he was crushing a bug, then opened them up like whatever it was had vanished. ‘Then you find out that the world is… this.'

‘I used to be a much older man,' the Indian mumbled.

‘Hows that?'

‘I woke from the earth,' he said. ‘Like I had been buried there. Woke and found the earth a younger place, and me a much older man—shrunk with age.' He sat hunched, the humerus bones, resting in the femurs. He sighed. ‘I suppose you are going to tell me my time is up,' he
said.

The stranger examined the edge of the ax. ‘I dont decide such things,' he
said.

For a moment, the Indian almost laughed in spite of himself. ‘You didnt decide to throw me—my entire village—into the well?'

The stranger looked over toward the bloodied mess of the commandante's corpse—his corpse. ‘Commandante there thought he did,' the stranger said. ‘But Ive had a while to think. Most men dont live in their heads enough to understand the universe like I
do.'

This statement did make the Indian laugh. ‘When you cut me up, cut my ears off first.'

The stranger returned the laughter. ‘Suppose it wont make a difference. You'll be dead here a few minutes. Just thought you'd want to know what the future looks like.'

The Indian laced his fingers together, the boned ones and the ones of flesh all folded around each other. ‘Dont need to know,' he said. ‘Seen the past clear enough.'

‘Yes,' the stranger said. ‘Thats how you can tell. Thats how I knew the commandante—that old fool—would die and I would be here
now.'

The Indian turned his head to look at the stranger and call him a fool, a charlatan. But the ax came down and severed through the bridge of the Indian's nose and cleaved a wound wide and deep. Brains spilled out with blood. As if he were still alive, the Indian's body shook and a puddle of urine flooded the ground around
him.

The stranger stood over the body until it stopped writhing. Then he turned about face and walked toward the fallen portion of the wall. The soldiers rankled their blades and shouted in cacophony. At the edge of the spilled fill, the stranger knelt and scooped up a handful of the till, he examined the gravel and sand, the bone meal and teeth. Then he looked up at the soldiers watching him. He dropped the fill and extended his arms. ‘Friends,' he said. ‘Ive been looking for this place for quite some time.'

As he crawled through the mines, the man tried to calculate his direction best as possible. He reached forward, feeling the ground in front of him, trying to feel if his body had slid over the dirt, if he had passed this way before. He had been crawling for some while now. Hunger growled deep in his gut and he ate a few pinches of dirt to fill the void. He'd slept just as he was crawling, taking care only to sleep in a passage narrow enough that he couldnt turn around while he slumbered.

In the complete dark, he had little room to deviate from whatever he supposed his course was. When he had to shit he pulled down his pants and crapped in the middle of the passage.

He came to the end of a tunnel and the overhead opened enough that he could sit upright. The obstruction in front of him was a pile of rocks, something wooden too. He figured it to be a collapsed ceiling. Knowing this was an unstable area, the man loosened a rock and waited, listened for the grumblings of another pending cave-in. When there was none, he grunted and rolled the rock aside. In his mind, the man strategized, thinking if he could clear the rocks under the wooden beam, he might be able to make safe passage by using the beam as a support. He spent hours wedging his fingers into the fissures between the stones and clawing them out. Dirt packed in under his fingernails and flakes of the nail began to lift from the finger itself. Twice a stone, loosened by the removal of another stone, fell on the man—the first time on his hand, the second time on his shoulder.

Before the man had burrowed his way through the caved-in portion of the tunnel, he fell asleep. In his dreams, he kissed his woman, grabbed at her breasts. She laughed and held him close to her. A baby, swaddled and cooing, lay in a crib made from a crate. In this dream the woman spoke his language and she told him to stay here with
her.

‘Why would I leave?' the man asked, kissing at her neck and down onto the exposed tops of her breasts.

The voice she spoke in this time was not her own. ‘Because you already have, you son of a whore.'

He looked up into his woman's eyes and she cried, looking out the door over his shoulder. The man turned and walked out of the hovel. As he walked past the threshold, he realized he held a jawbone, sharpened down into a shank, at ready. He stepped outside and the world was a different place. Giant mammoth buildings blocked out the sun, though one constructed of glass panels reflected it in a mosaic fashion. The ground was flat and hard, scraps of paper, flimsy white cups blew down the streets. The man turned around to look back into the hovel and his abode was on
fire.