Gabriel's Story (27 page)

Marshall looked from one to the other among the group, his eyes for once not full of answers. There was a quivering tension in his face, and he cast his vote for the canyon. For Gabriel, the smell of fear from Marshall was more frightening even than the sight of the riders behind them.

As the storm broke and rain fell from the sky in quarter-sized drops, the group dropped down into the canyon. They had to dismount and lead their horses, cooing to them and humming and trying to keep them calm as they skittered and fought for footing. The men slipped and bashed their shins on the loose flakes of stone, and lightning lit the sky and thunder rolled across the prairie like someone tossing out a blanket of stones. Gabriel could barely keep his footing. His horse supported him as he dangled and stumbled at the end of its reins and followed him down out of a sense of obligation that had nothing in common with its own wishes.

Soon the descent eased to a more gradual slope, but as it did, the walls on either side grew higher, narrow and carved by the workings of water into smooth organic shapes, so it seemed as if they were descending into a living creature. The walls played tricks with the already mysterious flashes of light, each bolt creating around them a moving landscape of contours. The horses didn't like it. James's horse began to buck. Gabriel saw it in brilliant, electric detail, the horse dancing from side to side, fighting against the walls, then kicking out behind it and lunging forward. The canyon darkened for a long moment of commotion, and when Gabriel could see again, James's horse was gone, having somehow bolted past the boy and pushed through the line ahead. James rose from the ground, sore, groaning, and cursing. He set out after the horse.

Feeling as though he were alone for a moment, Gabriel turned and looked past his own horse. Caleb stood only a few feet away, watching him, with his horse so close behind him that the creature's muzzle nearly rested on his shoulder. Gabriel moved forward again. A few hundred yards in and the walls gradually widened, enough that they could walk two abreast. The rain still fell steadily, and Gabriel noticed for the first time the water through which he sloshed. It was only ankle deep, but it rushed by him in a stream that seemed to increase in volume even as he watched. It was as if the earth, parched for so long beneath the sun, had forgotten how to absorb the moisture and was trying to shed it instead. He stumbled through it with careless feet, kicking them forward and trusting his boots to find their footing of their own accord.

Then they reached a dead end. The walls around them curved into a sort of bowl, twenty feet wide, facing a branch of the river, which rolled by in swirls of boiling current, mud-laden and brown like the walls around them. It seemed a different form of the same substance: rock turned to water, sand to flowing current. The horses shied and brushed against each other and looked around with wild eyes. The men let loose their headstalls and the horses bent to drink, only in this activity finding a moment of calm.

Dallas scrambled back up the canyon to keep lookout, and the men huddled in the rain and tried to think. None of them stated it, but they seemed of a single mind on one point. They had no wish to do battle with those twelve, not here, not like this, not with the rain pelting them and the horses wild and their hearts trembling with a terror they couldn't fully name. James stood close to the others, his eyes hard on each of the men as they spoke. He seemed to have forgotten his fear of these men and his loathing for their deeds. For a moment, he was united with them by a greater fear. Gabriel stood a little away from the others, watching the horses, the current of the river before them, and the walls of the canyon up to their brim, above which the sky had darkened almost to night. He thought of the girl as he'd last seen her. From where did her serenity come?

Dallas returned at a dead run, stumbling and tripping, moving forward more like a rolling boulder than a two-legged creature. “They're coming,” he cried. The men were in motion instantly. They moved toward the horses, and as they did so, a clap of thunder brought its hand down on the canyon, sending a jarring rumble of echoes through the place. The horses grew frantic. One reached for another with its teeth; two others passed a few blurred seconds exchanging kicks. The men tried to separate them, to soothe them so that they could be ridden. But in the end Marshall yelled to just grab a horse and mount up, damn it, or die here. He was on a horse the next second, apparently having jumped from the ground and landed dead in the saddle.

In the flickering light, Gabriel watched him spur the horse into the water. The horse fought and neighed and would have balked, but Marshall's will was stronger. Horse and man entered the water, sank into it, and were swept away. Gabriel stood without moving, and it was only by accident that he caught a horse. The creature was running past him, up the canyon, and its reins brushed his hand. He grabbed them. The horse stopped, and Gabriel mounted. He watched Dallas and Rollins go into the water, and it was only then, as they were swept downstream, that he knew what he could do.

As James entered the river, Gabriel felt a sudden desire to yell to him, to call him back. He didn't have the plan formulated clearly in his mind. It was only a vague notion of a possibility, and he needed extra seconds to think. But James's mount kicked free of the shore. The boy turned and shot a glance back over his shoulder. Gabriel didn't move. He met James's eyes, but he didn't beckon. He didn't call to him. He didn't gesture. It was too late for any of these things. He simply met his eyes and watched him slip away.

Caleb followed James's gaze back to Gabriel. It was just a momentary glimpse, and the next second he was in the current and moving. Gabriel almost followed, so strong had the touch of the man's eyes been, but when he heard a sound behind him he found his resolve once more. He moved the horse to the water, talking to it, asking for its strength and for its faith in him, and also calling silently to James to forgive him. They entered the water, and he turned the horse upstream.

At first Gabriel had to fight to keep the horse pointed into the current. It tried every few seconds to turn, but he yanked it back on course each time. To his surprise, the horse found some footing. It strove forward a few good strides, water billowing off its chest, then it fell into deeper water. Gabriel shot glances behind him but could see nothing. It seemed they had already put a cornice of stone between him and the beach, although he scarcely thought this was possible.

His attention was drawn back to the horse as he almost pitched from the saddle. The creature had swum into a swirling eddy that sent the confused horse and boy circling in a strange flow of gurgling, recirculating water. Gabriel felt the horse fighting panic beneath him, trying desperately to sort out the currents and make sense of it all. In a moment between swells, it slipped forward again and crossed the main current. Gabriel thought for a moment that all was lost and that the horse was retreating. But the creature never turned the side of its body to the current. Instead, it ferried across the current at a slight angle, touched land, and a second later was up on a shore that Gabriel hadn't even noticed.

The horse didn't await further command. It bounded up a shallow wash, paused, and went on, slipping where it got steeper. Gabriel pitched forward in the saddle. The horn twisted into his abdomen, and as he called out in pain, he fell from the saddle, his foot tangled in the stirrup and his body dangerously close to the horse's frantic hooves. He rolled away, sprang to his feet, and was back with the horse in a second. He tried to stroke its muzzle, but the horse snapped its head up and bared its teeth. Gabriel gave it the full length of the reins and then led it forward until the ground sloped more gradually. He mounted again, and the horse pushed forward in a frantic set of strides.

Horse and boy burst into the open air of the prairie like creatures expelled from the earth by force. The horse paused, shocked by the sudden change. For a second, Gabriel thought that all was silence, but then he realized it was just the opposite—all was sound, the steady beating of the rain on the earth, of the wind across it. He shot a glance behind him but wasn't even sure he could see the wash through which they had traveled. He was sure of one thing: there was not a living person left on God's earth, not a living creature to be seen at all, save for the horse and himself.

A sputter of sheet lightning afforded a quick illumination of the land. Under its light, the boy realized for the first time why he'd felt so little control over the horse. It wasn't his horse. He looked down on the long silver withers and sharp ears of Marshall's dun. He spurred her forward and was off, fighting through motion the deep sense of foreboding that this realization left within him.

Part 4

FOR THE FIRST HALF-MILE THEY CLUNG TO THEIR EXhausted horses with little semblance of control. They bobbed and
swirled with the current, both men and horses fighting to keep
their heads above the waves. The torrent pushed them onward.
The walls rushed past on either side, adding to the chaos of speed
and amplifying the roar of the river, which was now the only
sound save for the muffled shouts of one man to another.

The blond man held the lead by a good forty yards. His eyes
were riveted downstream, but he realized too late that the flood of
water in which they flowed was not this river's main stem. He saw
the sky open before him, and as he rose on the crest of a wave, he
saw the junction of the two currents, this one and the larger one it
fed. When the rivers merged, the two currents tore into each other.
Both he and his horse were sucked under. He felt the horse slip
away from him, though he tried with all his strength to hold the
reins. The current was a hand that pushed him down and twisted
his limbs and rolled him over. It held him down long enough that
he feared for his life, and then thrust him up to the surface. He
turned and would have shouted to the rest, but he spat water
instead of words.

Each of the others hit the boil line and overturned just as
quickly. Feet and hooves gashed the air, and then all went under.
They were tumbled about like straw figures and came up gasping
and as white as their skin tones would allow. The large man
breached the surface with both hands raised above him as in supplication to God; the young man lashed out toward the air and
broke into it cursing; the thin-chested black boy came up stroking
toward one shore with all his might; the dark man in the rear only
lost his horse for the space of a few seconds. Alone of them all, he
seemed to find purchase on top of the water.

The horses swam for shore, but the current was swifter now and
even more chaotic. The black horse reached a sieve of boulders and
tried to mount them. It scrabbled against the stone with its shins
but could find no footing. The water pushed against it, and its
body buckled between two rocks and stuck fast. Another horse, the
glossy-hued sorrel, scrambled onto a shelf of rock, but it was so
crazed that it ran into the wall and slipped. Its hind legs twisted,
and it came down against the edge of the shelf with a force that
broke its back.

Having witnessed most of this, the blond man turned his gaze
back downstream. He breathed deeply, and rode impassively
through a train of twenty-foot waves, finding a rhythm within
them and breathing each time he broke the surface, resting when
he went under. Breathing and resting. So he rode them out. A half-mile further down, he crossed an eddy line. He swirled downward,
but once more the depths found him distasteful. When he breathed
again, it was in quiet water behind a jutting shelf of rock. He
pulled himself halfway out of the river and collapsed. The black
man and his horse joined him sometime later. They sat beside him
and shared the dripping night in silence.

Neither of them knew the fate of the other three. They didn't see
them swim around the bend and onward. The young man made
it to shore by the sheer force of his cursing efforts. The other white
man tried but could gain no control of his squat body. His long
arms lashed out in a chaos of motion, and in the end he simply
watched with wide eyes as he slid down a flume of water and into
a wall of foaming backwash. It hit him in the face with a force
beyond anything he would have thought possible. The down-rushing current flipped him over and pushed him to the bottom of the
river. When he surfaced, he was blue and nearly dead and so
exhausted he could not move his limbs. It wouldn't have helped if
he could. He came up in water bubbling upstream. He was pushed
back into the same flume. When he next hit the surface, he didn't
try to breathe but only looked at the sky for a few seconds. The current pushed him down and let him up again and again, like a rag
doll, like a toy meant to look human but that had never had, and
would never have, a beating heart.

It was the black boy who swam the farthest. He slid along the
canyon wall, his fingers searching vainly for a hold. He had just
about given up in body and mind when the river calmed into a
long pool of slow-moving water. He floated on his back, buoyant
now that he'd stopped fighting. The evening's light dimmed; the
clouds above him rolled on and spent their fury. He cried. Finally,
after so many days under the weight of his own mind, he floated
free of it. He felt himself wrapped within a deep, somber embrace
that was beyond reason or conscious thought but was emotion
wrung to its core, to its length and breadth, and left exhausted.

It was strange, he thought, floating like this, letting go like this.
Strange that everything now seemed so clear. Stars appeared, and
the boy watched the dancing play of their light across the river's
surface. He found a beauty in this that was akin to no portion of
his soul. He knew now that he would not swim for shore. He
thought of his friend and almost formed his name on his lips. If
his friend could only feel what he now felt coming . . . If he could
only know what it feels like to swim into the heavens.

GABRIEL RODE AT A GALLOP as long as the light held. He slowed to a canter when he could no longer see the land before him or make any sense of directions, then eventually eased into a dull, halting plod. He could barely make out the highlights that were the horse's gray ears, and he could feel the animal's fatigue in her labored breathing and reluctant steps. But he wouldn't let her stop. All he thought of was movement. It seemed the only thing that could save him, and he rode the entire night, his eyes open and his mind alert. More than once he believed he heard pursuers. More than once he asked the horse to tread less heavily on the ground and to keep to herself her complaints and neighs.

By morning he had put fifteen miles between himself and the others. As the sun rose, he realized he'd crossed the great bowl and risen into a rugged, rust-colored wilderness of decaying hills and cacti. He was amazed that the horse had managed to pick her way through the thorny landscape, but he didn't pause to commend the creature. He didn't trust the distance. He didn't trust his own eyes. The coast was clear, not a soul to be seen, yet still, each time he turned his gaze forward, he felt riders at his back—which ones, why, and with what motive didn't matter. He must flee them all.

He kept it up all day, pausing only to water the horse at another fork of the Colorado River, a shallow canyon that proved not difficult to cross. The horse would have stayed by its waters, but Gabriel pushed her on. The afternoon took them into a landscape dotted with buttes and strewn with rocks. Water pooled in sulfurous depressions that made their progress a winding, uncertain one. The air was a rank substance, thick in the nostrils and more like a liquid than the thin gas it was meant to be. It attacked the boy's eyes and stung the back of his throat. But he pushed on, forgetting the land behind him and not even pausing to consider the land to come.

Gabriel remembered late in the afternoon that a horse could be ridden to death. He dismounted, suddenly aware that the creature had been pushed to the limit of her endurance and teetered at the edge of oblivion. She walked delicately on her left forehoof, and judging by the way she shook her head, she seemed to have trouble seeing. Gabriel led her on patiently, slowly, and yet unrelentingly. He wished her to live, but life meant movement.

The two camped that evening beside a shallow creek that held water only in stagnant pools between the rocks. It took Gabriel some time to find an opening deep enough to scoop up water with his hands. His fingers stirred up muck from the rocks, but he drank anyway, till he was bloated and exhausted from the effort of it. Only then, lying on his back and staring into the sky of early evening, with the horse still lapping at the water a few feet away, did he pause long enough to wonder what had happened to the others. Yes, he'd seen them drive their horses into a raging river. He'd seen the phalanx of riders closing in behind them, he'd felt the palpable fear in each man, and he'd cringed beneath the pressure of the downpour that sought to drown them all where they stood. But what had happened next? It seemed impossible that they could live through the moments to follow, and yet he could believe only so much as he'd seen. And he hadn't seen Marshall die, or Caleb. Those two might never die, at least not through an act of man.

Nonetheless, he believed quite completely that James was now dead. It had been written on his face for some time. He saw James's face before him with a clarity beyond that of the actual moment, and he asked himself questions whose answers he already knew by heart. Had his eyes really been so torn by betrayal? Had he been so painfully aware of all that came before and all that would come to him in the next few moments? Was it death written there?

The horse raised its head and exhaled a long breath. Gabriel knew the creature was still saddled and waited to be tended to. But still he didn't rise. It seemed too great an action beneath the weight of the stars. He remembered once hearing a tale in which stars were the souls of men after death and the earliest stars to appear were the most recently passed. Looking at them now, he could believe this to be so. His eyes followed the appearance of one star, then another, the faint trace of a third, then a bloom in which the purple velvet of the night seemed alive with points of light. So many souls. He said a prayer for them all, knowing with a certainty beyond reason that one of those points was the soul of his companion.

He didn't fully mourn that night, but he knew he would someday. That night, the future lay before him like an enormous question, a puzzle that he looked at from a distance that grew greater and greater as his fatigue overcame him. When he finally slept, he did so with a stony heaviness that was broken neither by the calls of the coyotes that swarmed around him to drink at the pool nor by the enormous rush of sound and movement that was the awakening of desert bats. They surged up from a cave mouth less than a half-mile from where he slept, circled in ascending spirals of thousands upon thousands of separate beings, then shot into the night air in a fury of hunger. When he rose the next morning, he would feel that during his sleep he had traveled very far in the company of a great host of beings.

THEY FOUND THE WHITE BOY SITTING on a rock at the edge of
the water, shirtless, weaponless, horseless, and dejected. He turned
as they approached. He spat.

Well, shit, if this ain't just perfect. You hombres know where a
man can get a shirt around here?

The men didn't speak to him, other than to have him rise and
climb out of the canyon at gunpoint.

Didn't figure you did.

The trek out took three hours. At the rim, the boy looked back
down upon the river. Damn. He let his eyes follow its course as it
meandered away in a bizarre, circuitous route, the canyon walls
layering in on each other in dozens of colors and shapes, growing
deeper with the passing miles and so stretching to the horizon like
a disease eating into the land. The men prodded him to movement.

They walked another twenty minutes before they came to a simple camp. The son was there. He rose when he saw the boy and set
down his coffee and walked to him. The son's face had aged in the
past week. Lines furrowed his forehead, and the weight of mourning sat at the back of his eyes. His lips were parched and peeling.
He touched them before he spoke.

Were you party to the murder of Diego Maria Fuentes?

Who?

My father. Mi padre y mi familia. Did you kill them?

Hell, no, I didn't kill nobody.

The son asked him who did, but the boy said he had no goddamn
idea. The man did not believe him. The other men beat the boy for
several minutes, and the man asked him again. He still had no
goddamn idea, but he figured it might have been the nigger.

He's a murdering son of bitch if ever there was one. I ain't had
nothing to do with that, though.