Afterlands (4 page)

Tyson’s wife and son were to have accompanied him to the funeral, but he and Emmaline had quarrelled again and he had left for the train alone. Of all the things that had kept him alive on the ice—fear of disgrace and the hope for fame (the two are really one), duty to the flag and to God, old habits of discipline, hopes of exposing Budington, hopes of punishing the crew, dreams of a bath and fresh oysters with horseradish and vinegar and her hot crusty bread, richly buttered, dripping with molasses—none seemed as important as Emmaline and little George. He had his duty to them too. Above all, he had his Love. In the breast pocket of his shirt he kept a torque of strawberry blonde hair with a circlet of the boy’s auburn hair linked through it. Only let me return and I’ll never again look complacently, or with bored aversion, on the comforts of home. On the ice he’d contemplated Home so avidly. And somehow in the fragrant, copious kitchen of his meditations he’d altered it—or his absence had. On his return as a hero he seemed to feel, naturally enough, that some kind of reward was in order, but the boy seemed a changeling, his wife a disappointing impostor. Stern-faced, stolid, thorough—not the imagined bride who’d helped keep his heart beating in that hell.

Clearly she found him changed as well. His faith had been fractured. Because God had not been out there. He couldn’t tell her that in the Arctic an interstellar cold and darkness dipped down to touch the planet’s bare scalp. As a whaler, then a mate, then a captain, Tyson had been up there often before, but never in such a naked way. He was struck through by that cold and darkness and carried them back to the human South like an infection. The house became a chambered vault of ice. In recreating his journal for the book, he’d often referred to God’s watchful Providence on the ice, and the repeated act of writing the words had seemed to trick back some faith—though never for long. He has constructed himself around various loyalties, and his fame is built on just that, yet now it seems he’s destined to fail—to leave on the ice—his wife and small son. It’s an era when such an act can destroy you. There’s a mistress now too. But the new expedition he will lead (to initiate a white colonization of the Arctic) will remove him from the scene for now and allow him to go on convincing others that he’s still what he’s thought to be.

What he’s thought to be is a man of his time. The ice has made him a man of our time.

As the coloured maid admits him to the vestibule he can hear Kruger being introduced in the parlour. When Tyson finally enters, a hush falls. Kruger, in his overcoat, is kneeling in front of Tukulito, who is collapsed, dwarfed, in a deep wing chair by the hearth. Kruger holds her hand in his two hands—an almost courtly posture. Now, seeing Tyson, he rises, releasing her hand, and steps back, though not far. His fists disappear behind him and he averts his face as if to study the Civil War lithograph hung over the sideboard. Tyson’s scalp burns. The house seems very warm. It hits him that perhaps the German has still not removed his overcoat because he means to pocket some of the lesser crystal by the decanters. That or it’s the only black thing he owns. The Budingtons receive Tyson with frosty correctness. Their mouths are compressed as if the glasses between their fingers hold not sherry but vinegar. The mourners stare with bright indecisive eyes, as if torn between interest in Tyson, fresh from the lecture circuit, and fealty to the ruined Budingtons. Tukulito draws herself out of the chair and stands—Tyson begging her not to rise—and whispers his name. Face shrunken with sorrow she smiles a little behind her veil to pretend she is all right. On the ice he never once heard her complain. In the crook of her arm is a battered Esquimau doll—Punnie’s doll, Tyson recalls it well, with its pouting sinew mouth; boy dolls smile, the child once informed him, the girl ones they all frown. Tukulito sets out across the carpet toward Tyson, who moves to intercept her before she can faint.

Chihuahua State, Mexico, New Year’s Day 1877

H
E EMERGES FROM THE WINE-CELLAR DIMNESS
and chill of the cantina and lifts his face to the sun still afloat over the plaza, still parching its border of adobe shops and acre of rusty dirt with such severity that it seems this town, Maria Madre, has become the sun’s exclusive target. Even now, late afternoon, the throbbing air hits him like a draft from a boiler-room hatch. And the roar of the fiesta—the hollering, the song and the talk, the blurting of trumpets and fast strumming of guitars—seems the peculiar and complex clamour of that heat.

He follows a troupe of drunkards merrily shouldering their way to the front. They are got up in tight short jackets, broadcloth trousers, boots whose blacking holds the cayenne dust. Around Kruger young women in hoopskirts, tortoiseshell combs in their blue-black hair, press together on tiptoe in their cliques or stand perched in side-on embraces, two to a wooden chair, a half dozen to a bench. Passing them he breathes more deeply, not so much to inflate his chest as to take in as much of them as he can. A man with a cigarillo and tusky moustaches as white as his hair shoulders a grandson who squints stoically through the flies. The man offers the boy—perhaps five years old—a puff of his cigarillo. The boy gravely accepts.

Toward the front, seeming to hover above the crowd, a stout matron sits sidesaddle on a mare, her sun hat as broad as a parasol. The bridle is held by an old Indian in livery who stands at attention by the mare’s head with his heels together, dirty feet fanned out, eyes closed. He’s snoring. A wide, acorn-coloured face, like Ebierbing’s poised above a seal-hole.

Kruger strokes the drowsing mare’s forelocks and muzzle and tucks his hand into the nosebag. At the bottom he finds untouched corn and scoops and pockets a handful. The mare twitches, shies her head. Her gummed, blinkered eye, brown as syrup, pops open and considers him. A reflection in the eye makes him look behind: three other Indians, all in white blouses, have laddered themselves rump on shoulders in the manner of circus acrobats. The top man surveys the chaos from under the brim of a hawk-feathered bowler, the middle one gnaws at a tortilla, and the bottom one, squat and husky with cannonball calves, his bare feet planted, has no view of anything but still grins with buck teeth as sweat courses down his cheeks. Giving Kruger a second look—everybody does that here—he grins bigger and Kruger realizes he was not actually smiling before, the teeth project so sharply that he can’t close his lips.

Kruger reaches the crowdfront where children in blossom-bright outfits festoon the crux and boughs of an ancient pecan. Massed along the eaves of shops across the plaza more onlookers, sharply defined by the back-sun, stand or hunker or sit with legs lolling. Far behind them, bordering the world to the southwest, a grey reef of barren peaks.

The plaza itself is vacant. Kruger is unsure of what’s to come. In the cantina various revellers had competed to explain matters, gathering around this compact gringo with his heavy brow and hands, pipe with a curved stem, ratty bow tie. At last two drunken rancheros, despairing of his Spanish, began to mime a confrontation involving on one side a bull—a man planting the ends of two soup spoons on his lowered brow and lurching around the cantina, butting at a ring of giddy onlookers—and on the other side … what? A man with a broken nose raked sideways at a drastic angle stood swaying, head back, hands raised with the fingers curled, as if clinging to a precipice. Eyes in a blind squint. Clearly insensible to the pain it should be causing, he kept pursing up the nose and forcing out rough, bestial snufflings. Onlookers slapped at thighs and tables. A bear, Kruger assumed, but then the bull huffed and charged and the bear, roaring theatrically, snatched the bull’s horns and lobbed them aside and cinched its opponent round the waist from above and the two men, near spastic with mirth, started grappling wildly, the circle of spectators yipping and cheering. So perhaps it was to be some kind of contest between men in animal costume? Some annual indigenous rite. Kruger drained his mug of gluey
pulque
and chuckled around his pipestem as the men, now locked in earnest, wheeled as one over the clay floor in the manner of a keg rolling over a ship’s tilting deck.

Waiting with the crowds Kruger dips into his waistcoat fob and takes out a few of the almonds he shelled during the siesta, sitting on the side of the pallet in his ten-centavo room. In these almonds, pinched last night from a torch-lit stall in the thronged portico beyond the church, Kruger tastes most of all the fat. For the last four years he has not stopped craving fat and now expects he never will.

Through a growing gap in the crowd at the southwest corner, blurred through the heat’s liquid shimmerings, a complex apparition is entering the plaza. Kruger, slowly chewing, squints against the sun. For a moment it seems that some immense animal is being torn apart for sport, files of men like centipedes heaving on opposing ropes, the animal already in two large pieces. Kruger stops chewing. There are two animals, he sees, a black bull and a brown bear. They are twisting, thrashing stiffly, a length of rope stretched between them—no, a chain, like the grapnel chain of a sloop, five or six feet of it linking one of the bull’s forelegs to one of the bear’s hind legs. Radiating round the animals like spokes are teams of barefoot men in the white pyjamas of peons. Three teams fan out from either animal, hauling on ropes attached to each of their free limbs, keeping them apart. The teams closest to Kruger on either side tug rhythmically, pulling the animals into the heart of the plaza.

Other men appear through the dust and miraging heat: a fat officer waving a sabre and yelling orders, behind him five men elongated by the heat into uniformed scarecrows, barefoot, with rifles and bayonets. Kruger looks down. A mestizo girl in a stained smock held up at the front with both hands as if to keep it out of the dust is skirting the crowd, yelling up at the faces. A ranchero next to Kruger responds, tosses a coin that the girl receives by unfolding her smock and catching it in the pouch. The pouch contains little cobs of scorched Indian corn. With a grubby hand she passes a cob and then a second cob to the ranchero and scutters on.

The man turns to Kruger with tiny drunkard eyes like bullet holes in a door.

You American? he shouts over the din, offering the bigger cob. He smiles with gold fangs under wax-pointed moustaches. Kruger, taking the corn with a half bow, says, I am from Prussia. Germany.
Muchas gracias. Habla usted
… You speak English? Perhaps you might explain to me. …

The man thrusts out his bristled chin, clucks his tongue. No have English.
Poco, poco
. You … no Espanish?

I am sorry,
no hablo mucho español
. I crossed the river only three days ago.

The man smiles, spreads his palms in a shrug, nods vehemently at the corn. Kruger never has to be exhorted, but now his mouth is too parched. With his tongue he tests the corn’s luscious glaze of salty grease and charcoal, but can’t bite in. It’s the nearness of the first bear he has seen—and now smelled, a dense feculent waft of confinement and squalor—since the Arctic. And the presence of soldiers. Uniforms.

The peons have manoeuvred the animals into the heart of the plaza and are holding firm, leaning back on their ropes. Limbs spraddled out by the lines, the scrawny bear gnaws at the knots around one paw, then the other, back and forth as the moulting hide billows over its bones, the hump of the shoulders. The bull, small but fit, its front-heavy shape sleek and lean, is yanked back by the ropes onto its haunches. It brays like a train, tossing a maul-shaped head at the sun.

The officer holds up his sabre and performs a sort of slow pirouette, on tiny feet. He has spurs, a frogged and braided green jacket, gold epaulettes, a cocked hat with a plume. Medals, of course, winking on his breast. Apparently he means to slaughter the animals while they’re helpless. He steps toward them, blade over his shoulder. The mob is coaxed to roaring of a fresh fever. He nears the bear. Its piggish snout is wrinkled back, lips peeled off the lathered fangs, jaws gaping. The peons haul back on their lines: with a choked moan the bear seems to offer its paws, like a schoolboy submitting to the cane. The officer hefts his sabre and slashes. As the blow falls, the line of peons staggers backward, some of them laughing as they stumble and the crowd is laughing too and Kruger can see that the bear is uncut, his left front paw now free. The officer has severed the rope, a foot from the knot. With a new spryness, maybe a sign of faltering nerve, the man nears the bull as it puffs and lurches, eyes rolling, left foreleg flared out and held taut by the line. The man hacks at the line, rushing the effort, needing several blows to finish. He yells something shrill as he backs away. His preposterous plumed hat on the ground like a dead rooster. The foremen on the remaining ropes skitter in with knives in their teeth and crouch just out of the animals’ range, carve quickly, rise and flee. The peons and soldiers scatter wild-eyed, laughing.

The bear and bull in their separate ordeals have seemed mutually unaware but they turn on each other instantly. The starved bear writhes around, rears up and lunges at the bull with shaggy arms open like a hunchbacked wrestler. The little bull lowers its muzzle to the dirt as if ducking, then rockets its head up at an angle, hooking with the outer horn. The bear drapes over the bull’s shoulders, gripping with its fangs and rending with its claws, and the bull bucks, lifting its attacker off the ground again and again, the bear’s hind paws dangling, chain and rope-ends swinging, as the bull thrusts a horn into the bear’s groin.

Kruger can hardly hear the animals’ slaughterhouse roaring over the din of the mob. He’s moved forward by the pressure of people frantic to get closer, while he himself wants to retreat. The chain confines the animals to their own small island of intimate struggle; like the castaways on the ice. Kruger turns and realizes he’s trapped. He’s pushed, loses his balance. The ranchero grabs his arm and hollers something close in his face and Kruger smells
pulque
, peppers, Indian corn.