Gabriel's Story (28 page)

You believe it was the Negro?

The boy told him yes. He named the man and called him a
stinking nigger.

Now can I go? He's probably dead down in that canyon anyhow.

The son asked him if he had defiled the girl along with the others. The boy was slow in answering. He said that he might've had
a little poke but that it wasn't what the man thought.

The girl liked it when I did it to her. It was that hairy son of
a bitch and the nigger that she didn't like. I always gave it to her
gentle-like. Don't tell me you ain't never done the same.

But the son gave a signal, and one of the men knocked the boy
unconscious with the butt of his rifle. When the boy awoke, it was
to a stinging pain in his groin. His head heaved, and the world
seemed skewed, and before he was conscious of anything else he was
conscious of his own nudity. He was tied down on the desert floor,
with his arms and legs pulled taut toward the world's four quarters by horsehair ropes that bit into his skin. The ropes were held
in place by boulders, on each of which a Mexican sat watching.
Between his legs was the conspicuous mound of an anthill. It was
these creatures that had begun to attack the flesh between his legs.

The boy screamed out, first with pain, then with curses, then
with pleas for mercy. He twisted and yanked at the ropes and
thrashed his legs, but it was no use. He asked if he was to die this
way, and they told him yes. He asked how long it would take, and
they told him only a day or two. They watched him with cold black
eyes, and not one of them seemed to feel the boy's pain, or care.
They looked at him, then off at the horizon, with the indifference
of men who had seen much worse. Two of them smoked; one bit his
nails and spat the splinters to the wind.

The insects rose from the mound in great numbers, but they
went to their work with a single mind, their pincers slicing into
his flesh like the knives of so many whalers into a huge beast. The
boy lay back, writhing in pain. He begged, but none moved; he
cried, but none even flinched; he cursed, but the men only watched.
Only when he whispered a woman's name did the son decide it was
enough. He rode up to him and, from horseback, placed the barrels
of his shotgun on the right portion of the boy's chest. The boy was
silenced with one blast, and mercy was awarded. The other men
looked at the son, but the son turned without comment. He caught
sight of the Scot and the girl coming toward them and rode out to
intercept them.

WHEN GABRIEL AWOKE FROM HIS FIRST LONG SLEEP, it was midday and the horse was nowhere to be found. The boy viewed this fact with quiet eyes and set out to find her. As she had made no attempt to conceal her movements, he soon found her settled down in the shade of a large boulder. The horse registered the boy's presence with a nicker, then slowly rose and came out of the shade to greet him, clanking and sore beneath the saddle.

Gabriel apologized to her silently for the mistreatment, then thought again and spoke aloud. The horse's ears pricked up. She eyed the boy, then turned broadside to him and stood as he unfastened the saddle and its accounterments. The saddlebags were heavier than he'd anticipated. He dropped the first one hard on his toe. He laid them out on the ground and sorted through the supplies provided to him by providence—or accident, he wasn't sure which. There were ample matches, a large sack of flour, half a block of bacon, a lump of lard, several twists of tobacco, and a frying pan lid. No pan was to be found, but Gabriel only half registered this fact. His attention was drawn to a jar of preserves, a rich, sugary jam of a fruit similar to strawberries but somehow different. He ate it straight from the jar, shoveling it into his mouth with his fingers and soon feeling an exhilarated lightheadedness. He let the horse lick his fingers.

Marshall's Winchester was still loaded and heavy. Gabriel studied it carefully, afraid to shift any of its levers or to fire it but staring at each section of the thing as if its function could be divined through sight alone. He set it away from the rest of the supplies. He did likewise with the two Smith and Wesson thirty-two-caliber revolvers, along with the cartridges for both makes of weapon and even his tiny derringer.

Only after his arsenal had been so displayed did the boy turn his attention to the remaining sack. He slipped the gold brick out of it carefully, cradling its soft, dense weight with all the care he'd give an infant. He set it down, remembering how it had once looked like a coffin. It didn't look so anymore. Coffins were for beings who had given up their lives and so moved on. But this square of gold was not of the same make at all. It had never lived, never breathed. It was simply a bit of metal that, through no fault of its own, drove men to acts of passion. What should he do with it? What could he do with it? He stood above the display trying to think it out, to answer the question right there and have it over with. But no option that he mulled over seemed quite right. It made no sense to leave it where it lay, or to hide it, or to give it away, or to take it home and fall prey to the dreams and schemes such things lead men to. Men like Marshall . . .

The thought sent chills through the boy. He looked anxiously around him, for fear that his thoughts might instantly become reality. Then he packed hastily. Because he could not answer his own questions, he would try to conquer them through motion. He would ride; he would walk if the horse was tired; he would keep up a steady movement for as long as it took to find his way home. He threw the saddle over one shoulder and carried the bags dangling from his other arm. As he led the horse away, Gabriel had the feeling that he was just now beginning his real journey.

FOR THREE DAYS THE MEXICAN, his companions, and the Scot
patrolled the rim of the canyon. They ranged down its edge some
thirty miles, stationed at different points, searching for signs
of the living or the dead. They spotted the bodies of two horses, one
floating in a section of flat water twenty miles downstream, another where the waters of the storm receded, wedged between several rocks, its legs splayed out in bizarre directions. It looked like
thrown-together pieces of a horse. Its muzzle pointed up toward the
canyon walls, so that the man who found it thought the creature
was looking at him. They found a few pieces of debris, some saddlebags, and a waterskin.

It wasn't until the second day, at the full extension of their
search, that they found the black boy. He had washed ashore on a
narrow strip of beach lining a sheer cliff face. To get to him, the
Scot led several of the men down a ravine and into the river
upstream of the body. They floated a quarter-mile down to him in
the slack water. The boy was lying face down, and the Scot rolled
him over most gently. The boy's eyes were closed, something remarked upon by one of the men. His clothes were all in order
except for his boots, which had been sucked off by the current. The
Scot probed various portions of his body, as if he might find the
source of the injury that ailed the boy, but there was none. His
body was completely intact, whole and undamaged. He was simply
dead. They considered the trek back to the rim with this dead one
carried between them, and as it scarcely seemed possible, they
agreed to bury him where he lay. The one who knew the proper
words spoke only Spanish. The Scot shrugged and asked him to
proceed, and the man did, intoning solemn foreign words that the
Scot couldn't understand but that he trusted would lead the boy to
heaven as surely as any others.

In the evenings the son sat with his sister. They talked little
about what had happened. They spoke as if they were not sitting
on a bowled scoop of the high desert, as if they had not lost the
things they had lost and not seen the things they had seen. Only
once did the brother speak to his sister of the future they must now
share. He said he didn't see it yet, didn't understand how there
could be such a thing, although he knew there must be, because the
world did not stop to notice the pain of any one person, no matter
how deep it was. He promised her that they would find a way, a
path in life that would honor those they'd left behind. He promised
her that one day she would be whole again and he would be whole
again. Everything that was Papi lives on in us, everything that
was Mama and that was Cristina. They all live on in us. The girl
nodded and said that she believed this. Perhaps more even than
you do, she said.

Late on the third day, the son thanked the men for their help.
He called them brothers now and forever and praised their bravery
and let them know that he would lay down his life for theirs at a
moment's notice. Then he told them to go home. It was over. They
drank together that evening, although they did so with the most
somber reverence. The son's first companion asked what he would
do, and the son said he would stay away a few more days; he
needed the solitude if he was to find a reason to live on. He confessed to this one that it was not as he'd told his sister. He did not
believe his own words. I should have killed them with my own
hands. I should have eaten their hearts and dragged them into hell
by their entrails.

The companion offered to stay with him, but the son would not
let him. The next morning the men rode home, taking the girl with
them. The son watched them to the eastern horizon, then mounted
his horse and sat. The Scot had stayed as well, saying that he too
needed solitude to find a future. He sat on a rock. The son thanked
him for all he had done and called him a brother like the others
and assured him that his guilt had vanished as his heart was
good. He bade the man to go once more with God, and with that he
moved off. He gave his horse no direction but let it graze where it
would. As there was little that could be thought of as food, the horse
wandered upstream. The man eventually dismounted and followed
behind the horse, like a shepherd with a flock of one.

He spent the day like this, and it was in this way that he came
upon the narrow ravine upriver from where the fugitives had
entered, beyond the area searched by his men. It was little more
than a crack in the earth, and it stretched down toward the river
at such a sharp angle that he doubted the possibility of the tracks
he saw within it. But they were there. He saw where the tracks
ascended, where they reached the surface, and how the lone horse
had risen out of the earth. He saw that it had pawed the ground
and twisted in a half-circle. And then he saw it move off to the
north. He followed the tracks to the horizon. He asked for God's
presence, and then he whistled for his horse.

He found the Scot sitting in the same place he had left him,
in the same posture. I think this is not over, he said.

The Scot looked up at him and searched his features for the
meaning behind his words. He found it. He rose.

Good. It didn't feel quite like it was.

GABRIEL HAD LITTLE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GEOGRAPHY of the western portions of his country. He simply knew that with the men he had traveled south to Texas and then west through the New Mexico territory and into Arizona, all the way to the river canyon where he'd made his escape. As he would not retrace that route, his course seemed obvious. First north, then east. Somehow, he hoped, that simple elbow of direction would lead him home. It would, but it would also take him over territory he had never conceived of before.

For the first few days on his own, Gabriel headed to the north-east through a landscape that he'd become familiar with over the recent weeks. He intersected once more with a main stem of the Colorado River and followed its scarred banks. When the river forked off either due east or in a more northerly direction, Gabriel opted for the east, feeling comforted by the notion that he was moving closer to the rising sun with each step. It was a deserted country, nowhere marked by boundary or fence line, roadless and empty save for the animal life, for birds, for shad-scale, sagebrush, and the wind in all of its various moods.

Through the days of silent travel he developed a routine, a discipline almost, enforced by nobody but himself and therefore that much more natural. He tried to eat frugally. In the mornings, he collected the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, as he'd seen Dunlop do once. He skinned each one carefully and took small bites of it, finding it sweet and good, although it stained his fingertips a deep maroon and left a strange sensation in his mouth, the unshakable feeling that his gums and tongue were being stuck by tiny pins. At midday he'd pause long enough to roll a cigarette and sit with one leg thrown over the horn of his saddle, inhaling the smoke and taking in the country. He'd never smoked before, but now, with his solitude close around him, it seemed a natural thing to do. He made only the smallest of fires in the evenings. Huddled beside it, with the horse just a few steps away, he fried strips of bacon and baked bread, a hard, greasy loaf shaped decidedly like the frying pan lid. He followed this with coffee, an oily syrup that he drank straight from the all-purpose lid. It was a foul mixture, and yet somehow it seemed right, just the stuff to fill his stomach and fuel his imaginings as he stared up at the night sky.