Air and Fire (22 page)

Though almost a week had passed since the outing on the water, Wilson was only now addressing himself to the task of sewing his map back into its hiding-place. Dusk had fallen on the town, and he could hear men returning from the afternoon shift. He sat in his window with a needle and thread, an oil-lamp close by. He was not much of a seamstress. He had already pricked his left thumb and two of his fingers. Each time it happened he held the wound away from him and saw how the tiny bulb of blood swelled and glistened in the soiled yellow light. Yet he pressed on. His spade, his rifle and his pickaxe stood on the far side of the room. They had the look of old acquaintances, propped against the wall like that, all in a row; they seemed to be watching with a kind of quiet amusement.

Such was his concentration as he bent over the jacket that he lost the feeling in his good leg. He stood up and, leaning his weight on his walking-stick, circled the room. The plaster would be coming off next week. He could hardly, wait. So much would suddenly become possible. He paused by the window. Stars glittered above the ridge, whole constellations; the tail of the scorpion curled down like a hook for a hat. He missed the sky above him as he slept. He missed that vast, overhanging silence. He even missed the irritations: sandflies, cactus thorns, the absence of shade. He sat down again. On with the jacket. Half the hem was done, a zigzag of stitches, a drunk's walk down the lining. As he took up the needle he thought of the journey he would undertake with Suzanne. The day before, he had spent part of the evening in her company, and she had talked of little else.

They had been sitting on the veranda of the Hôtel de Paris, the only people there. A night of almost inconceivable stillness. They could have been imprisoned in a vault; gold would probably feel like this, he remembered thinking, as it lay in windowless rooms beneath a bank. He had smoked half a cigar to keep the mosquitoes away and when he let
the smoke drift out between his teeth it hung in the air, almost without moving, like a flower that blooms at night. He let her excitement wash over him, never taking his eyes off her face except to attend to his cigar or glance along the veranda to where Rodrigo was standing, or not standing so much as leaning, slouching against the doorpost in his pale silk shirt, as if he had no bones to hold him up. Only when she paused for breath did he betray some uncertainty about the venture. It was two days' ride across treacherous terrain, and he was not sure that a woman, any woman, would be up to it.

She absorbed the subtle compliment that he had paid her, but mocked what she called his ‘lack of faith'. He had disappointed her, she said.

‘After all,' she went on, ‘we could always take longer. We could spend two nights under the stars. Or three.'

‘With the rattlers,' he said, ‘and the polecats.'

‘Rattlers?' She studied him sternly. He could see that she suspected him of inventing dangers now, and she would rather challenge his authority than own up to any fear.

‘Rattlesnakes, vipers, scorpions, tarantulas.' He smiled into the night. ‘There's even a poisonous tree. If you sleep under it, you can go blind. And there's no water anywhere. None.'

‘So I will have to make the journey alone,' she said. ‘Is that what you're trying to tell me?' Her lips had hardened in defiance, a sharp edge to their usual soft lines. And yet a smile lay below the surface, waiting to emerge.

She was determined to go at any cost, and he soon tired of trying to discourage her. It had, in any case, been a show of undeniable perversity on his part, since there was nothing he would rather do than ride with her to San Ignacio. He could imagine arriving above the town with an hour of light remaining in the sky. It was always a shock to look down on the oasis after crossing the lava fields and plains of basalt that lay to the east. It was so lush suddenly, so tropical. All those green trees clustered in the valley, all that green water. It did not belong. It could not be real. It could seem almost cruel.

He could still remember the last time that he visited the mission. There had been a party for the
padre
, Father Lutz, who was going up country the following morning. His Indian converts had danced the fandango until daybreak, their sweat spattering the floor of the barn like rain. Even the Father had danced, his cassock swirling around his bare ankles, a flagon of wine balanced just above his eyes. Father Lutz was the kind of missionary the Indians could understand. They were still dancing at nine o'clock in
the morning when the Father rode out of town with a cool cloth wrapped around his head. He had drunk too much of the local wine. He could not even lift an arm to wave.

Wilson looked up from the jacket lining and out through the window. One star fell in a breathless curve. Perhaps he would dance the fandango with her. If she did not know it, he would teach it to her. First the wheeze of an accordion. Then a guitar picking up speed, the click and chatter of the castanets. Her skirts spinning across the dirt floor, one curl coming loose and dangling like a spring beside her ear. Air the colour of crushed pomegranate. Rush torches blazing. Laughter. In many of the songs there would be obscene references to cacti and volcanoes, but they would be in Spanish and she would not understand. If she asked him for the words, he would sweeten them in his translation.

And later in the night they would stroll among the palm groves, beside the still green waters of La Candelaria. He would sing the song that he had written, the song about gold. She would listen, and she would understand only half of it. That was the beauty of the song. Later still, they would bathe, perhaps. Cool their feet, which had been scorched by hours of dancing. Wash the sweat and smoke from their bodies. And he would turn his eyes away as she took off her clothes because his love was of a size that could embrace all denial.
I don't want the day to end.
The words that she had uttered on the boat. It was his wish that she had voiced that afternoon. His one impossible wish. Impossible because unthinkable. Doubly impossible because it countered everything that he admired in her. Her faith, her purity, her love. If she were to betray those qualities and turn to him, then she would forfeit his respect. His love could only be denied or else consume itself. In her own sadness, though, she had not noticed his. He had been grateful for that. His sadness was something she must not be allowed to see. He would show her only joy.

A sharp pain arrowed through his thumb. He watched another ball of blood form on his skin. But he had almost closed the lining of his jacket. Only one more inch to go.

‘Don't show it to anyone. Not to anyone.'

He saw his father leaning over him, a twist of black smoke rising through the glass shaft of the oil-lamp. The cords strung taut in his father's neck, the skin draped over them like canvas. The map spread beneath his gaze. It had been laid out so many times, in so many different rooms, that it had become obedient; weights were no longer needed to hold the corners down.

‘Keep it sewed up in the jacket, sewed up good and tight. And keep your mouth sewed up likewise.'

His own mouth twisted away from his face when he spoke, like a steer fighting to escape the branding-iron. His eyes were always looking beyond the walls to some far horizon, some future time: the place where the map began, the moment when they entered it. But the place came no closer, and the time never arrived. All his father's luck had drained away and only fear remained. He was convinced that they were in danger. If they made one move towards the gold they would be ambushed and robbed – probably murdered too.

For almost eighteen months they traced a wary arc across the southern states – Texas, New Mexico, Arizona – keeping a safe distance from the line that marked the beginning of the map. They never stopped in any town for long. They switched hotels after dark, riding in rivers to become invisible, or splitting up and taking different trails so those in pursuit would not know which one of them to follow. They travelled under false identities. Sometimes they dropped down to the Mexican border, and spent a night in Tombstone or El Paso, but they always left the next morning, a feeling of ricochet as they headed north or east, into a land where nothing could happen. They stayed in red-light districts, near railroad tracks, on waterfronts. Places with names like Hell's Half Acre. Places with no name at all. Anywhere so long as it was cheap, anonymous. One night they watched an orchestra of ladies who were clothed only in their undergarments. For their own protection, the ladies played inside a cage that had been electrified. Three men had died trying to climb between the bars. In Fort Griffin they met a man who had no ears and no fingers, his punishment for stealing a fellow-miner's gold. Life descended into nightmare. Countless evenings where they were barricaded in some room, listening for footsteps on the stairs. His father kept his right hand thrust into the bosom of his coat, as if he had a gun in there. People took to calling him Napoleon. ‘Big mistake, heading into Russia like that,' they would say. Or, ‘How's the syphilis?' ‘I'm not Napoleon,' his father would mutter. ‘I'm nobody.' All he wanted was to feel safe. All he was seeking was refuge, invisibility.

‘Not a word to anybody. Not one word.'

1882–1884. The lunatic years.

Wilson thought it must have happened during the poker game in Reno. When his father let that man reach below the table, knowing it could be a gun that he was reaching for. When, smiling, he let that
man reach down. You have to be part crazy to orchestrate that kind of moment.

It was what dreams did to you if they did not come true. They made you mad with the constant glimpsing of them. The dreams were there, but only just. The heels of the dreams were always vanishing round corners, and when you reached the corner they were gone. Only you saw them; that was what made them so valuable, so terrible. Only you saw them. And when there were things that only you could see, then you were crazy for sure. A footprint on the sand, one snapped twig in a forest. The trail that you were following did not exist for anybody else. On you went.

‘Keep that mouth of yours sewed up. Good and tight now. Good and tight.'

Some nights he woke with a cry, thinking that his father was bending over him with a needle and thread. He could feel a tugging at the corner of his mouth as the first stitch tightened. He could smell his father's bitter breath.
Hold still now. Just hold still
. Other nights he dreamed that the horror had already been accomplished. He would lie awake as morning came and would not be able to open his lips. He feared mutilation at the hands of his own father. Towards the end he had even feared death. They would be sitting in a hotel room in Bastrop or Santa Fe and he would see his father's head lurch round and fasten a mad but calculating look on him. He was the only person in the world who knew about the map. Could he be trusted with the knowledge? He slept in snatches during the daylight hours and lay awake all through the night. A son fearing his father, his father fearing everyone. It could not go on.

Seventeen months after that game of cards, his father was dead. In a boarding-house in Silver City. The name of the town cast an ironic shadow over the event. His father had never in his life sought any metal but gold. In that one sense you could say that he had been faithful. His chest had been crushed by a stagecoach as he crossed the main thoroughfare at midnight. Listening for the dreaded footsteps, he had not heard the wheels.

It was a decent boarding-house, with curtains in the windows and no gambling allowed. His father's hand lay on the clean sheet, fingers curled. Cracks ran lengthways in the nails. His father's wool shirt hung on the back of a chair, the breast decorated with medals of blood.

Exploiting his father's weakness, he did something he would never otherwise have dared to do. He took his father's hand. And held it.

‘You got the map?' His father could only gurgle. He was drowning in his own fluids.

Wilson nodded.

‘It's safe?'

He pressed his father's hand. ‘It's sewed into my jacket,' he said, ‘just like you showed me.'

‘Never found it, did we?'

He could only smile down.

‘On the grave,' his father said, ‘I want some words.' His eyes cleared for a moment, a gap between clouds. Then he coughed, and his chin tipped backwards, and his voice filled with blood. Wilson thought that he might never hear the words.

At last his father found an ounce of breath.

‘Still looking,' he said.

Two hours later he was dead.

The last stitch, double-strength, was now in place; the map was back where it belonged. And he was standing on the land that it described, ground that had taken his father's luck, two-sided though it may have been, and spent it all. He could have inked himself in, with a hat, a moustache and a broken foot, three inches to the south-west of the women with the pointed breasts. He was here, he was on the map, and yet he seemed no closer to anything. His father would never have imagined such disillusion to be possible. Bending over the needle, he severed the thread with his teeth, then tied the two tails in a solid knot.

He stood up, poured some water into a bowl. Then he began to wash. He was expected on the Mesa del Norte for dinner.

‘I hear that you're looking for gold.' Monsieur de Romblay's face lowered over the table like a huge ripe fruit that might drop at any moment from its branch. ‘Is that correct?'

‘Yes, sir,' Wilson said. ‘It is.'

Monsieur de Romblay nodded. ‘I didn't think that you could have been drawn here simply by the beauty of the place,' he said with a smile, his face resembling a fruit more than ever as it glowed and dimpled in the candlelight.

There were a few sardonic chuckles. Then a man with a thin face and prominent knuckles leaned forwards.

‘It would be better to go back to where you came from, would it not?' The man's name was Pineau. He was not a man for whom Wilson had developed any great fondness.