Air and Fire (16 page)

‘I wanted to be with my husband.'

‘And now?'

She gave him a steady look. ‘You're insolent, Captain. I expect that's why they sent you here. It was your insolence.'

‘Perhaps you're right,' he said.

Though her rebuke had been seriously intended, he had chosen to treat it as a joke. His voice remained light and mischievous, admitting no remorse, no guilt. She felt cheated. He had taken the confidence that she had given him, and used it against her.

She moved past him, towards the door. Somehow she felt that she had been robbed of the initiative, and that her departure from the room could be seen as a retreat. She heard him follow her, his spurs chinking
every time a heel struck the floor. The sound was like a few coins in a pocket, a handful of loose change. It seemed to mock her. Was that all she was worth?

‘It is almost seven o'clock. You should go, or people might begin to worry.' He was still behind her, speaking into her back. His words were ambiguous. They contained equal measures of menace and concern.

The carriage was waiting outside. Night had already fallen. To the north the furnaces had thrown an amber light into the sky, as if that part of town had been left out in the rain and then rusted. It was the only light there was.

‘It's so dark,' she said. ‘How will he find the way?'

‘He knows the road.'

As she stepped up into the carriage, Montoya took her by the arm, asking her to wait, and before she could ascertain the reason he had turned and hastened back into the house. He emerged a moment later with a lit candle inside a dome of glass. She took the lantern, asking him what it was for. His smile was crooked in the tilting flame, unstable. It was so he could watch her, he said, as she travelled back across the town.

Wilson was woken by Indians shouting in the room below. They had arrived three days before, from the mainland. They were a tribe that he did not recognise, short querulous men with barrel chests and hair that hung in greased strands to their shoulders. Wilson had seen them through the gap in the floor. Sitting cross-legged, they scrawled sets of circles on the bare boards with a piece of charred wood. Then they tipped pebbles out of leather pouches. They would be up for hours, drinking and gambling, cackling, spitting. Their little stones would rattle through his dreams.

He lay down and tried to sleep, but his foot was troubling him and he was up again as the sun poured its light across the waters of the gulf. He watched the miners shuffling out on to the street. They could not have slept for more than an hour or two; it was no wonder they could scarcely lift their feet. And now they would be working underground, in temperatures of forty degrees, pitting their strength against the stubborn local clay. But that was how the Indians lived. They thought no further than the day or night that surrounded them. They always looked forward to the ripening of the pitahaya, but when the time came they never harvested or stored the fruit. They ate as much as they could on the first day. Towards sunset they could be seen sprawling on the ground, speechless, bloated, green in the face. He had once heard of an Indian who had received six pounds of sugar as payment of a debt. The Indian sat down in the dirt and ate his way through the sugar, every ounce of it, and died. Wilson did not doubt but that story was true. They did not think ahead. There were those who said they did not think at all.

He rolled a cigarette and took it out on to the balcony. He sat on his weak chair, smoking peacefully. The ridge to the north-west had caught the sun. The rock glowed orange. The land that lay below still stood in shadow, the colour your fingers go when you gather wild berries. He could see a long line of men moving on the path that climbed up from
the town. They would be heading for the Arroyo del Purgatorio, where a new bed of copper had been discovered. He still could not get used to the sight of so many Indians collected in one place. On his expeditions inland, his many fruitless searchings for the riches he believed were buried there, he had become acquainted with their customs. They were a nomadic folk, with no attachments to the land and few belongings. They travelled in small groups to where the food and water was, seldom sleeping on the same ground twice. They were simple, hopeful – credulous. In their daily lives they would walk for twenty hours without fatigue, but give them a vision of doom, a man painted half in red and half in black, and the light emptied from their eyes and their muscles cramped. It took something supernatural to happen before they believed their grievances were real. Their progress up the wall of rock seemed laboured now. He could not help wondering how it would end.

His gaze dropped down into the town. In the square outside his window men were already at work on the church. He had grown used to the ringing of hammers; if he closed his eyes he saw a score of blacksmiths making shoes for horses. Almost a month had elapsed since the tramp steamer had docked; four metal arches now stood on the ground, four hoops lined up in a row and linked by horizontal rods, like a wagon with the canvas off. He could see Monsieur Valence, seated on a packing-case in his black frock-coat, mopping the sweat from his forehead. The pale face seemed turned for a moment in Wilson's direction, and Wilson raised a hand in greeting. The Frenchman did the same. But that was the limit of their acquaintance. No word had yet passed between them.

He took up his guitar and ran his thumb across the strings. One jangled chord lifted into the air. In his enforced idleness, he had decided to write a song. It was about gold, of course, but it was also, in a curious way, about Suzanne as well. The words would have a kind of double meaning, if he could just get them right. He only had one line so far, which had come from the dream he had woken with on the morning she arrived: ‘Gold fever, running in my veins …' That was it. He had already decided to dedicate the song to her and, when it was finished, he would play it for her, one quiet afternoon, in the shade of a veranda.

His eyes blurred, took on distance.

A morning in the hills west of Salinas. A morning that had stayed with him. The sun slanting on yellow grass. Pale-green moss hung from the
trees like the matted strands of fleece that sheep leave on fences. A cool morning, early fall.

They had stolen two horses the day before, in Greenfield. A good horse was better than money, his father always said. It might last fifteen years, which was more than money ever did. Money had this way of spilling through your fingers, even if you closed a fist round it. Money always found the one hole in your pocket. Money ran out on you every chance it got; it was even worse than women. These were lessons he had learned from his father, though as a teacher his father often contradicted himself. He taught out of bitterness instead of knowledge, that was the trouble. Take women, for example. It was not women who had run out on his father – if anything, it was the other way round – but it was not the son's place to point out inconsistencies; it was the son's place to listen. He owed obedience, still being only twelve years old, not yet a man. And that obedience, that listening, could pass for love. Were parts of love. When his father told him they would have to steal a horse or two to get through the winter, he went along with it. But the horses that they stole that day, a chestnut and a roan, from the back of the Staging Post Hotel, belonged to a marshal who happened to be visiting the town. They were fortunate to escape arrest, hitching a ride on a melon cart, switching two hours later to a doctor's wagon that was travelling in the opposite direction, then walking half the night. That was the nature of his father's luck: two-sided, like a coin.

But he woke the next morning with a feeling of lightness that he could not explain. He threw off the blanket and, leaping to his feet, tried to stamp the life into his stiff limbs. He saw that his father was still sleeping, so he set about gathering some kindling for a fire, just enough to boil water for coffee. It was a risk, but only a slender one; during the night they had climbed high into the hills and they were now shielded by oak trees. He drove two sticks into the earth, balancing a third above the flames. He slung the kettle on this third stick and sat back on his heels.

When the steam began to swirl across the face of the water, he went to wake his father. His father was lying there with his eyes open. He was staring up into the trees. His eyes wide open, like tins to catch the rain for drinking.

‘The coffee's ready, Pa.'

His father did not answer. He just lay on the ground, still as fallen wood, and did not say a word. Did not even blink.

‘What's wrong, Pa?'

He had never seen anybody who was dead before, and maybe this was what it looked like. Your eyes were polished till they were clean and so much silence was poured into you, it reached all the way to your fingers.

‘Pa?'

His heart was threatening to jump between his ribs.

And then his father's lips moved. ‘All I ever dreamed of was to find us some gold.'

His relief converted into faith, the faith his father had instilled in him. ‘There's plenty more gold in the ground, Pa. It ain't all used up yet. There's plenty there.'

‘That's all I ever dreamed of and all that happens is we end up running from the law.'

He leaned closer, his faith working his tongue for him, lending him the words. Maybe they were running towards the gold, he told his father. Maybe all their running, it was in the right direction. It was just that they didn't know it.

His father was still lying there, the shape of people when they put them into coffins. A faint smile altered his mouth, but it did not reach his eyes. His eyes were wide and frightened; they had that shine to them, the shine of something final. It was as if he were waiting for six feet of sky to come down and cover him like earth. As if he were so old that there was nothing left for him but that. And yet he seemed young too, no more than a child, and needed to be wrapped in something big like love.

Wilson reached into his pouch of tobacco and rolled another cigarette. He could not recall much else about that morning. He struck a flame on the wall behind him and touched it to the paper. He took the first bloom of smoke into his mouth and back over his throat. It was harsh Indian tobacco, grown in the hard ground. Harsh as memory.

There was one thing, now he thought about it. Something he had said to his father. Something that had been on his mind for weeks.

‘Maybe we should go home, Pa.'

His father's head turned slowly on his bedroll. ‘What good would that do?'

He could think of some good, actually, but he could not voice it, not with his father bending such a look on him. And just then the water, boiling suddenly, jumped out of the kettle, and he had to snatch it off the fire before it spilled some more.

They walked south, then east, with the trail losing heat behind them. Once they saw a group of horsemen cut out against the light above a ridge, but otherwise the world was theirs. No longer fearing capture and the branding that would surely follow it, they dropped down to the valley floor. On the third evening they felt secure enough to risk another fire. He roasted squirrel over a blaze of wild oak and, for want of any potatoes, baked some pale roots in the ashes. The squirrel tasted like rabbit, a pungent meat, but succulent. They cleaned their palates with some strawberries that he had gathered earlier on the wooded slopes. The next day they walked on, always east. His father did not talk at all, but he would often stop and lift his face, as if the air had spoken to him, as if it had said something that gave him cause to hope. To the north a range of yellow hills unfolded. The weather held, dry and crisp. He asked his father where they were headed, but his father would not say. The mystery walked beside them, always there, unsolved.

They walked for a month. Rising before dawn, sleeping at dusk. Moving all the time, and always in silence. He sang to himself so he did not forget he had a voice – 'Old Zip Coon' and ‘The Banks of the Mohawk'. They soon left the yellow hills behind. The earth altered beneath their feet. Though September must have been over, the air grew dry and hot. They crossed parched valleys, dried-up riverbeds; they climbed through fields of sharp red rock. They were finding no fresh water now. His father taught him how to create water where none existed. You cut the top off a barrel cactus and then dug a hole inside, about the size of a quart bottle. Then you gathered brush and built a fire around the base. In a few moments sap would collect in the hollow place that you had made. Only two cupfuls, and bitter, but drinkable – and it could save your life. Again he asked his father where they were headed; again his father acted deaf. He could almost see the mystery, walking just ahead of them. It seemed to be leading the way. It was as real as his father, and no less inscrutable.

And then, one afternoon, they came over a stretch of barren ground, a few red rocks, some wiry grass, and there, opening in front of him, was a chasm that was wider and deeper than his eyes could understand, a great gap in the world. He stepped back, dizzy.

‘The Grand Canyon.'

His father stood with his hands in his pockets and his toes close to the precipice.

‘People say the devil got mad and tried to cut the world in two.' His father turned to him. ‘Would you rather be home now?'

He could only gasp. ‘No.' All the doubts were chased out of his head by the red-and-violet splendour of the place. All the words too. All the thoughts.

Later they climbed down to where the river, pale-green and lazy, coiled along the canyon floor. He stood on the bank, his shoulder touching his father's rolled-up shirt-sleeve. His father stared at the water with such defiance, it might have been the source of all his misfortune. But his voice, when he spoke, was gentle.

‘Now this is something to remember,' he said. ‘This place, us being here – that's something to remember. But not the rest of it.' His face opened; he hazarded a smile. ‘At least I showed you something.'