Refiner's Fire (35 page)

“Why not?”

“Yahoo!” they screamed, moving like greased lightning to set up a table, lower a gambling lamp, and put a big mesh grill on the fire. “That's for shrimps and bacon,” one said. “When we play cards, we grill up shrimps and bacon, and drink beer.”

“Suits me,” said Marshall, for he loved shrimp cooked on an open fire. “Got any soy sauce?”

‘Any
what
sauce?” asked
Mor
noe.

“
Soy
sauce.”

“What's that?”

“It's a sauce they have in Japan.”

“Is this Japan?” queried
Mor
noe.

“No.”

“Then we ain't got no soy sauce.”

Quickly is not an adequate word for how fast they lost their $250, and they didn't get one bit of shrimp or bacon, or one sip of beer. In what seemed like the most superbly co-ordinated collaboration in the history of mankind, the old men conspired to distract, cajole, and waylay them, depriving them of food and money. Just as Al or Marshall would reach for a sizzling lean shrimp, a man would pick it off the plate, and another would say, “Call!” They carried this off with unimaginable skill until Marshall and Al were completely skinned. Despite the smell of broiling seafood, neither Marshall nor Al was hungry. “Now you only got five hundred dollars in your paycheck,” said
Mor
noe, “but that's all right, because spring will come, and you won't need too much money.”

He looked at Marshall and said, “I said you'd ride to the plains, and you did. And I'll tell you that by the time you get to the mountains, you won't need money at all. And then you'll go away, but in some time, you could be back.” He laughed. “What's that stuff? Joy sauce?”

“Soy sauce.”

“Like I said, this ain't Japan.” He disappeared into the fire, and they walked through the darkness to get back to work pulling apart the sad-looking bodies of slaughtered cows.

A
L SCHEMED
to resist the timelessness. He offered a nearby worker his pay for a watch. “What do you want me to watch?” asked the man. They decided to observe the course of the moon, but there was no moon. They counted cows and, after some time, compared figures. Al said they had processed three, and Marshall said a hundred and twenty. So they gave up.

They were working hard when they heard a singing noise in the distance, like the vibration of high-tension wires. It got louder and louder. They dropped their knives and rakes, and rushed to the door.

The sun was coming up fast and big, as if it were in a telephoto lens. They could hear musical tones and reedlike vibrations. In a vale of gold, it mounted steadily to a natural position high in the sky, where it seemed not to move but rather to beat and pulse. Steam covered the landscape as the snow melted and the fields became spring green. They could smell cows in the holding pens, see white clapboard houses in town, hear distant freights. The sun was warm, and the steam from straw-colored ground was good to feel. In the west, a range of mountains appeared as a light purple haze on the horizon. The plains flowed in all directions like a windy gulf.

Waving his arms,
Mor
noe trotted down the path. “C'mon with me,” he said. “C'mon. Spring came. It's time. Gotta wash up, wash up.” They ran after him to the baths. The door was open and a ticket-taker stood in front. “Okay for these two,” said
Mor
noe, and they went inside. It was packed with screaming children, adolescents, women, workers, and even old people crammed into the mineral baths. Sunlight streamed through fifty-foot windows, and puddles from the childrens splashing covered the floor. They'received watermelon-sized soaps and green towels, and soon after they had washed, shaved, and immersed themselves with the octogenarians in the hot brine pools and fresh-water rinsos, they went outside into an emerald of a prairie day. Flowers had arisen on the fields. The climate was perfect. Their clothing had been cleaned, and
Mor
noe gave them each fifty brand new ten-dollar bills. “You feel healthy, don't you?” he asked. “The mountains there are west, as any fool can see.” He made them kiss him goodbye, and then went about his business. Al had decided to head south. He wanted to see the Andes, but Marshall was to continue west. They agreed to meet on top of the Eiffel Tower at noon on July 4, 2000. Then they shook hands and parted.

Marshall walked silently through the courtyard of the slaughterhouse, past brick walls and smoking chimneys, past dozens of men in gray and blue hoods and bloodstained clothing, men who did not see him while they worked amid the carcasses and trucks and black smoke rising upward in a coil of bitterness. He walked as if in a military review, or graduation from a European war academy. But no one looked as he made his way past the brick and the wood, on which shone a golden sunlight as if from underneath a ceiling of storm clouds. He had lasted the slaughter intact, he was as solid or more so than he had been, and he hoped to leave it forever, graduating from that school with a full beating heart, heading west on a day into which a piercing ray had penetrated decisively.
Mor
noe had said that spring would come—it had.

H
IS WARM
parka was neatly rolled and lashed to the strap of his rucksack. They had not only cleaned and pressed his clothes, but repaired and waxed his mountain boots. He traveled across a flat, endless prairie, an ideal picture of a man walking. Healthy, somehow well-fed, clean, strong, and happy to have lasted his slaughtering task, he walked with buoyant step toward the mountains. He knew that eventually he would come across railroad tracks, and there he could jump a freight. Meanwhile, in the sunshine, he thought about
Mor
noe and Professor Berry.

They had curious similarities. One snowy day in Cambridge, Marshall had been winding from room to room in Kirkland library and had come across Professor Berry alone in a firelit study. The strange thing was that Professor Berry had been standing practically right in the flames. He quickly hopped out, and made some excuses about having lost his watch in the fire.

And once, a hairy ruffian had invaded Professor Berry's famous lecture on Magellan, and shouted him down. This ideologue had beaten professors, stood nude in the Yard, and shouted obscenities at children. In these activities he received thorough support from many not on the scene. But he did not dare touch Professor Berry, whose health, strength, and willingness to fight deterred him like a battalion of Gurkhas. Professor Berry looked at him with compassion, understanding, hate, and disgust. After uttering some nonsense about colonialism and imperialism, he turned to Professor Berry and said, “Like, look at you. Like, you're looking at me like I was like an animal.”

“Like you are an animal,” replied the good, one-legged professor with such severity that the room vibrated. “And you will like remove yourself from my class or I will like murder you and tear you into like small indivisible pieces uglier than your original self.” The ruffian didn't budge. Professor Berry was suddenly galvanized; his face beat with red and purple blood; and he charged with unstoppable ferocity, his wooden leg thundering against the floorboards. The ruffian ran out the door. Professor Berry remounted the podium, straightened himself, and resumed his lecture despite the wild heart-pounding applause of his students, who loved their professor for his courage in the face of the wave.

Then Marshall recalled what
Monroe
had said. He had been standing amidst the screaming half-slaughtered calves: “I been in every state in the Union, on the railroad. That was before I retired, some time ago. First, I worked in the dining cars, when I was young. In those times, rich men rode in cars bigger than houses. You wouldn't know about that. And we used to serve them all kinds of fancy dishes—Forfit of Cheese Mongolian, Paté of Turk, Larchmont Birch Beer, roasted Plant Pappy, Honeymoon Bungalow Cake, and Log of Chocolate Byzantine. But we never did what was dishonorable. We never bent our necks, no sir, and we always bucked trends. I say, fuck 'em. It throws you down and knocks you out, but when you get up again you feel twice as strong. I know. I did it. I do it. I been from Alaska to Alabama. I seen babies born. I seen bullets stop dead in the air. You always got to fight trends. You get alone, but it strengthens the heart.” He thought for a while, knitting his brows. “Britain stood alone. Lord, there is a texture in life, and a reward.”

Marshall caught sight of a magnificent, earth-shaking, three-hundred-car freight shuddering across the sunlit plains. He began to run, pounding over the flat ground. It was a joy to run, and, like a horse in effortless gallop, he came even with the train. He took hold and sailed onto it. Once on top, he sat on a catwalk and looked at the rolling grasslands and distant mountains. The landscape was nearly maritime in its expanse—like a Homer painting. He bent his head and lifted his eyes to the slit of the horizon, making a clean thought of the colors. They were so strong that he could almost lean against them as the train started up the western grade to the mountains.

Proceeding to vast areas of thinner air, he found them quite different from the Hudson. At Eagle Bay Marshall often looked through his white-framed windows into a green and humid landscape suggestive of a badly managed terrarium. The trees were wet and entangled, with corky bark and a sense of lizards. The fields were rich and loamy. But in the cool mountain range the trees were mainly evergreen, their disciplined quills as neat as a good hardware store; the dry pine scent inseparable from the wind whistling through their needles. There were some poplars and some ash, their leaves rippling the light like sun-covered water or bronzed sequins. He could tell that the water was fresh, just by looking at it. He was excited to be approaching once again alpine country in which bear, elk, and mountain goats bolted across unknown pastures close to the stars. The train went around bends, through the trees, over bridges of match-stick steel—vertical nets of metal contoured against red ravines with streams of white foam leaping down the crease.

Rather than cross the Continental Divide, Marshall left the freight on the eastern side at about 10,000 feet. He headed southwest along a great valley between mountains on which snow rested in patches near the summits. The land was so perfect that he made no mistakes. A bias right or left brought him either way to deserted meadows surrounded by blue spruce. On one of these meadows he discovered a small herd of mountain goats, or perhaps they were bighorn sheep. Who could tell? With the excitement which always comes upon seeing a wild animal in nature, he walked to them in slow, measured step, as if by negotiation he could approach and finally take them in his arms. He wanted to pick up a little one which had snow-white wool, ribboning curls, a palpitating heart, and an astonished, abandoned look. He would sit in the meadow and rock it until it slept, while its mother and father surveyed the distance.

At first, they froze. Only their great brown eyes moved. But when he was about 200 feet away they rose; the rams and the ewes, and then the lambs. As he was quietly tacking toward them, they suddenly started in combustive motion and (strung in a line like a rosary) vaulted and jumped into the forest, smashing down brush like a panicked infantry company, heading to some deeper meadow known to them for its safety. He loved their alert faces bent in arches and cheeked over like chestnuts, with sole-purpose eyes and razorlike gazes.

He spent that night in a meadow, curled up in his down parka. As it darkened he had nothing to do but lie back and watch massy white fonts of cloud illuminated and outwardly tumbling as they sailed by. The strange thing about the mountains was that hunger, thirst, cold, and other deprivations meant little. As long as they were not extreme, they served to sharpen the view. Marshall's supplies ran out two days off the train, and yet he walked rapidly and well. He subsisted on cold water, berries, and his southward momentum on the ridges. Dark as a brown penny, he grew nearly as thin, and began to remind himself of the way he once had been in the Rockies, in a world he perceived as a paradise saturated with adversaries.

M
ARSHALL CAME
upon a saddle between ridges, in which he found a small, perfect cabin, a corral, a meadow where two horses were grazing, a shed, and a stream channeled into a trough and out again past a waterwheel in a little generator house. The place was so neat that it might have been Switzerland—cords of clean split pine lay stacked in rows; the horses' hay was like combed hair; a small kitchen garden was tilled in straight tracks, immaculately weeded, and organized with the touch of science. Birds were singing; the sky was clear; and it was ten o'clock in the morning.

He could see no movement. He came out of the woods, walked past the horses (causing them to neigh and skitter), and went to the water trough, waiting for someone to appear on the porch. He was sure that by venturing into the open he had telegraphed peaceable intentions. A tin ladle hung from the side of the trough. He picked it up and dipped into the fast water. As he bent his head to drink, a rifle shot rang out from the house. The bullet passed so close that he felt the turbulence of the air. But, to reaffirm his peacefulness, he did not budge, and only turned his head a bit and smiled tentatively. Another bullet whined past; the crack of the shot reverberated against the trees. Still, Marshall did not move.

A tall black-haired woman kicked open the screen door (she had been firing from a crack near the window) and stepped onto the porch. As the door opened, Marshall saw and smelled a pine fire. The woman was holding a lever-action rifle, which she kept leveled at Marshall. A pistol hung from her belt. She wore a white blouse with ruffles at the collar, and her teeth were as white as the New Mexico moon.

“Take off your damned wig, Felipe,” she commanded.

“This is my own hair,” answered Marshall. “I'm not Felipe, either.”