Afterlands (45 page)

Still, he’s enjoying his apprenticeship. Like Goethe’s Faust pitching in with those northern villagers to reclaim lowlands besieged by the sea, he’s forgetting his sorrows in a large collective venture and hard, simple work. Having little more self and no more family to serve, this, he supposes, is how to live what remains of his time—in service to something else, beyond him and his own blood. This unremarkable conclusion has the power to make his throat throb, his eyes burn and stream. Such tears used to embarrass the Prussian in him. … Maybe up in Groton, Tukulito and her family will need him in some way. Maybe they have other children now, adoptive or their own—why not?—and will want to build them a larger house.

Jacinta has been sleeping in the intact houseboat along with her daughter and grandson while her obliterated home is being rebuilt. Her son-in-law sleeps among his tools and bricks in a sapling lean-to on the edge of the plaza. During the day she helps other women and children prepare the trampled fields for the summer planting. The old man, with no apparent tone of grievance or of brutal triumph either, remarks that they are apt to be especially fertile this year.

One evening, with the work of reconstruction nearing an end, Jacinta joins Kruger in the grove and sits beside him while he applies himself to a modest
tuahmec
and a single corn tortilla smudged with
halcumah
, a red-pepper paste. She says she has eaten already. He makes her take a little anyway; the captured oxen and corn and beans are being rationed, and the local food remains scarce. Perra’s ribs jut through her balding hide and she cuddles against her master in the night. Jacinta’s face more than ever shows its bones, yet she seems not unhappy, knowing Mateo to be alive somewhere, and finding herself, like Kruger, caught up in the age-old satisfactions of a robust communal undertaking.

She sits cross-legged in the sand a foot away from him, watching the river and swatting vaguely at the gnats, a red-and-green striped poncho around her shoulders like a shawl. Her unbraided hair is drawn back tightly and secured with a rabbit-rib comb. This evening, for the first time since his return, she wears her pewter and silver bracelets.

It’s at its highest this week, she says as the milky waters drone past. From this week on, it will get lower, and the
tuahmec
will go. You didn’t see that last time.

I think I left around this time, he says.

Autumn is the best time here. Food is plentiful, and the sandflies are gone.

He thinks that sounds quite wonderful.

Here’s your comb, he tells her.

She stares at it, feels for the comb already in her hair, regards him inquiringly. There’s always something potentially ferocious about her black eyes.

I took it from you when I left. Twelve years ago.

Ah!

You never noticed it gone?

I must have noticed, certainly. But a number of the
visitantes
would steal things like that.

She smiles at him, the mocking silver of her capped tooth.

Men want to think their acts are unique, she says. What women do, they know has been done before by their sisters and mothers and grandmothers.

With the shade of a grin, he looks at her aslant. You may be right.

Of course I am.

I took it as a memento, he says, and since I had nothing of my own to leave you, I hoped the … sentimental absence of the comb might be a sort of keepsake.

Ah, gifts of absence! The one thing any man can be counted on to give.

And some women, too.

I still wish you spoke Sina, she says, scowling. Stay here and learn Sina! You know how welcome you would be here. He smiles with some pain, his lips still cracked. You’re a hero to the village.

I told you, he says, I pulled the trigger because his words startled me so much. I flinched and it happened. Till then, I seemed held there. Maybe his words freed me.

She looks impatient.

It was as if I caught a flash, like a glimpse in a bad dream, of some future. Of men who want to become the curator of what they destroy. They’re so starved on logic that they need to cannibalize others, whole peoples …

What matters is you shot him.

The bucket, he says gruffly, I used the bucket.

No reply. He can’t get anyone to believe him. In the village now it is public knowledge that
Capitán
Kruger used Luz’s pistol to kill him—for what else could suffice to kill a devil but the devil’s own weapon? Not a wooden bucket. In fact, the Sinas are inclined to view Kruger’s preposterous story as a kind of boast—excusable, perhaps, in a hero—like claiming to have killed a monster with one’s bare hands.

You admit you shot the other?

That was easy, too easy. Like brushing a fly from a wound. Of course it was.

As if the first killing hardened me, in just seconds.

No, she says sternly. It’s because you’re a good man, and they were bad.

I might have been better if I’d been a bit worse.

Again she looks baffled. He doesn’t say what haunts him—that if he had killed Luz on his first opportunity, the night attack on the village might never have occurred, and many dead might have lived.

She shifts her haunches closer in the sand. He can smell her hair, her peppery sweat.

It might be better for the town, he says, if I’m not here when they come looking for Luz’s killer.

We would never betray you or give you up!

If they come, promise me you’ll flee into the sierra. Don’t try to fight them.

On behalf of the village I can promise nothing. Stay, learn our tongue, and maybe you can convince them yourself.

She leans into his side, her breast to his ribcage, then kisses his cheek. He turns his mouth to her upturned mouth. His hurt lips sting. Her own—dried blood salting the cracks—must hurt as well. There’s a stirring in his lap, like a small animal crawling over him. Her fingers dig into the stands of thick hair above his temples, seeming to palpate the bones underneath, as she did on his departure twelve years ago. As if having made a positive identification, she kisses harder. He grips her breast under the poncho and groans to feel it and then he feels its difference from Amelia’s—not so much a matter of size or even form but of something more unknowable; lost now.

He retracts his face, draws her hands from his head, gently kisses the palms. They smell of capsicum and his own hair.

It’s too soon, he says. I feel almost as if she were here. I mean the river itself. Not
in
the river—as if she
is
the river. I know this is absurd.

Jacinta waits.

Forgive me, he says.

You won’t stay, then. She looks surprised, a woman who has learned confidence in her charms, and who doesn’t ordinarily invite men, even heroes, to stay around.

There are two people I have to see in the north.

Women.

One of them, yes.

There are others who wish to marry me here. The Texan, for one.

The woman I mean to see is married herself, and a loyal wife.

Ah, the
indio
who was with you on the ice, the Esquimau!

I want to see them again, that’s all. I’m not looking for a wife up there.

Even if her husband is gone? Husbands go. They die, they vanish.

It’s too soon, he says.
And it’s too late
. Yet he keeps thinking of how that dead part of him has been stirred again here in the grove, with her, momentarily. How in the last weeks here he has started to regain a sense of solidity, almost belonging. How the food here is plentiful in the fall.

I’ll try to return, he says. I promise you.

She juts her chin, clearly unconcerned that he could be led astray by a mere
indio
. For Sinas consider themselves not so much as
indios
, but—like the Esquimaux themselves—as the People.

Still dressed as a Sina, he departs two days later. Perra he leaves with Jacinta, as a guardian and pet for her grandson, he says. The dog always was one for children, he says. He knows Perra has used up her last round on the heavy trek over the
barrancas
. So let her finish where she started.

On a
lancero
horse, a calm, solid chestnut gelding with a blond mane, a good horse for an unpractised rider, he travels northeastward, in his saddlebags a little food and his share of the pesos found in Luz’s quarters (very few) and among the
lanceros’
things (somewhat more). He carries Ortiz’s revolver. Luz’s personal weapons he urged others to claim as trophies, but the Sinas preferred to break and bury them with the man’s ashes. In Maria Madre, a mestizo town apparently untouched by Luz’s purging, he spends an uneasy night. The townspeople are suspicious of him, a foreigner in Sina field pyjamas carrying a
lancero
revolver. There are no
lanceros
or soldiers in the town. When he asks in the cantina about the annual bear-and-bull fight, people seem even more wary. The ritual was banned some years ago, the barkeep tightly explains, by the Padre himself. The Padre considered it barbaric. (Yes, says Kruger.) Of course, now that the Padre has unfortunately been killed, some will want to see the ritual revived. … The barkeep carefully leaves it unclear whether he himself would want to see it revived. He adds, The grizzly bear is mostly vanished from these parts, however. As Kruger glances at the other faces, they look away fast, abruptly captivated by their companions’ moustaches or the way their own hands rest, with studied slackness, on the tables. Probably they regard him as a spy for Luz, or rather Luz’s successor, whoever that might be. That night in his lodging he barricades the door with the deal wardrobe and chair and keeps the revolver to hand. At dawn, going downstairs and finding the horse untouched, he rides briskly out of town.

Before the mule ferry at Ojinaga, he slips off the road, canters west up the Rio Grande until he finds a wider but shallower reach that the horse can ford and swim. Then he rides northeastward cross-country in a sort of absent trance furthered by the unvarying landscape: scrub hills, mesas, terra-cotta plains now and then punctuated by hilltop haciendas and missions like baroque cathedrals built of mud. Sometimes over the horizon huge pillars of dust stand or travel slowly, as if from an army on the move. Cattle. He begins to see work parties in the distance, mauling posts into the ground and unrolling wire from huge black spools, fencing off the open range. Eventually he has to return to the main road. He sleeps in gullies under brush willows and cottonwoods, for him their rustling now the leitmotif of slumber.

San Antonio is full of Germans. Along a street with a German name he rides past German confectioneries and bakeries and dry goods stores, two Lutheran churches, a lushly watered beer garden. In the garden he sits with a brass tankard of lager and a plate of
wurst
on sauerkraut and mashed potatoes, among merry, successful-looking immigrants who chatter in various kinds of German. They glance his way now and then, cautiously. In the barber shop of Winfried Hussel, Kruger’s face shrouded under hot towels, these sounds of his first familial tongue have a keen impact. Before his eyes, all is dim and warm as a womb, so the effects of the German, as well as the aftertastes of
wurst
and
kraut
, are undiffused by the input of other senses. Memories mob into his heart and seem to stretch it painfully. From La Paz years ago he tried writing to his mother, his brother and sister, again, and again he heard nothing back. He assumes his mother must be dead. She would be seventy-five now. If she could see Kruger now, she would think her own child a foreigner and a stranger.

Have I made these towels too hot for you, good sir? asks Mr Hussel in English, apparently unaware of his silent customer’s origins. Mr Hussel, having pinched up a corner of the towel muffling Kruger’s brow, is leaning down, peeking in at him with a large yellow eye, the stropped razor held up beside his hairy ear. No, sir, you must not be too polite to complain if they should scald you! This is not our Texas way!

Kruger sells the good horse in the market plaza and buys a derby, Jaeger woollens, two linen shirts, a brown worsted suit, a pair of bluchers, and a cardboard valise. And a ticket for a train to the North, which he boards that same night.

A “prushun,” he learns, is new American slang for a kind of young hobo.

Washington, D.C., July 7, 1889

H
IS FIRST STOP
, en route to Groton. The missionary woman’s remark about the fallen hero enjoying a government position seemed lucid enough, among all her figments. He asks where he can find the Navy Department and he walks there, reconfirming directions along the way. His revolver is in his cardboard valise. He shortcuts through a hovel-town where half-naked Negro children pause their games of tipcat and tag to stare at this neatly dressed and shaved old white man—they must think he is old—passing through their neighbourhood on foot. Over the subsiding tar-stained roofs of the shanties, the high dome of the Capitol, not far off, glows in the noon sun: fresh white of an intensity that will always set Kruger in mind of snow and ice.

The Navy Department is housed in a surprisingly modest four-storey red-brick building on Seventeenth Street. The rotund doorman dozes on a stool inside the front door, which is propped open as if to catch any breeze on this humid, breezeless day. He looks as if he hasn’t been disturbed since the last time the country was at war. Years now. He’s hatless and his livery is faded and unpressed. Kruger crosses the threshold and softly puts down his valise, not wanting to alarm the man—who needs a shave, too, Kruger sees when his eyes adjust to the lobby’s dimness.

The doorman’s red eyes pop open and he starts to sit up, but then, taking Kruger in, he relaxes. The folds of black-bristled flesh under his chin flop back over the stiff collar. He looks like a baby with jaundice and a heavy beard.

Have an appointment?

I’m looking for Lieutenant George Tyson.

I always call him Captain, the doorman says in a tired, casual voice. Why do you call him Lieutenant?

He was a lieutenant when I sailed with him, years ago.

Sure, and he’s one again now. Lieutenant of the Watch.

The man yawns in his fat.

Then why do you call him Captain? Kruger asks.

Because he ain’t really a lieutenant. Lieutenant of the Watch is just a phrase. He was
definitely
a captain, though.

Where may I find him?

You were on the Howgate Expedition with him? The doorman’s eyes spark up, though he remains slumped.

No, Kruger says, another one.

The other one? A German, are you? The doorman sits up. One of them Germans? I’m Mexican, actually. Sure, of course—your accent.

Kruger’s accent is still conspicuously German. The doorman seems in earnest, though.

Who’d have guessed there were Mexicans on that voyage! How many?

Only myself, Kruger says with a kind of subdued Latin dignity.

Must have found it damn cold.

Kruger smiles, picks up his valise. May I see the captain now?

His office is … The doorman yawns again, eyes closed, not bothering to cover his wide mouth, though he lifts his hand to signal that he won’t be long. … It’s in the basement, next the boiler room. Number B-8. Says it’s the right one for him, always so warm. Stairway’s at the end.

The corridors of the Navy Department are still and deserted. Presumably some of the functionaries are lunching elsewhere, yet the quietude seems to go deeper, as if the white plaster walls and ceilings and the faded blue runners of the hallways have absorbed boredom and inertia for so many years, they exhale it like a vapour. In this dead stillness, the rows of heavy doors with brass nameplates seem less like throughways into hives of important busyness than like ranks of headstones. Passing a door that’s ajar Kruger sees a beige-haired man in shirtsleeves, behind a massive rosewood desk, peering down through a magnifying glass at a miniature schooner made of toothpicks. His lips are pushed out in concentration as he tries to insert a tiny mast.

The doors of the half-dozen basement offices are more closely ranked, and of pine instead of oak. It may be warm down here in the winter, but now, with the boiler off, it’s clammy, mildewed, deeply silent. So this is where the world has buried the lieutenant. Kruger would have expected to feel more satisfaction at the thought of his nemesis reduced from famous hero to factotum—adrift in the postscript of bitter obscurity endured, Kruger guesses, by the formerly renowned.

LIEUTENANT OF THE WATCH G. E. TYSON
. The door is ajar. He knocks. He prods the door further and looks in, half expecting to see Tyson asleep, head down on the desk. The office is empty. It’s windowless, of course, illuminated by a gaslight on the wall over the small desk. There’s a ladderback chair behind the desk and another in the corner of the room beside the door. On the wall where Kruger would have expected to see framed lithographs of heroic scenes from the
Polaris
expedition are two large photographs, one of a petite woman in summer finery, another of a family. He approaches the family. It’s a much older-looking Tyson and that woman, now grown buxom and nicely plump, along with baby daughters—twins—and a boy, perhaps three. On the desk, an ash-dish, ink and quills, a half ream of paper, a few letters slit open. A pocket book called
Angling for the Hobbyist
. Kruger settles himself on the chair by the door. He puts the valise between his feet, perches the hat on top and looks up at the woman in the frame. She’s confidently addressing her whole person to the lens. Her skin has a summer glow and her wide-set eyes are very pale and fixed. She’s attractive in spite of her nose, which is broad and blunt, almost snouty.

Kruger smokes half a bowl of tobacco and then walks off in search of a privy. He starts for the back of the building, some door to the outside, then realizes that such a place must have plumbing, a thing he has encountered only a few times in his life. After a search that takes him into a broom closet and a janitor’s cubicle, he finds another likely door, unmarked, and tries the latch. It’s locked. After a few seconds there’s a muffled sound of tumbling water. The door opens and a man emerges in a billow of smoke, a pipe chomped in his beard, newspaper folded under his arm. He’s wrinkled, almost bald, the top of his skull fuzzy. Wire-rimmed spectacles rest at the base of his nose. Over the top of the spectacles he gives Kruger a neutral, shaggy-browed glance, then turns and saunters up the hall. A stout man in a rumpled night-blue uniform, like the old parade kit of a second officer. A moment after he has passed, Kruger knows him. His walk is similar, if far less hurried and emphatic. After ten paces or so the man comes to a thoughtful stop, then slowly begins to turn his shoulders and head, to look back. Kruger enters the water closet and pulls the door closed. The body, as always, has the timing of a joke-teller; he really has to piss before he can confront Tyson. Or whatever it is he came here to do.

Above all, he’s afraid to ask about Tukulito.

He stands there for a minute or several, emptying, taking things in: the square wooden seat with the round hole, the wood-handled pull chain that dangles, still moving, from the reservoir. A porcelain sink the size of a water gourd. There’s a latrine smell but mostly the warm pleasant sweetness of pipe smoke.

He walks slowly up the hall toward Tyson’s office. The door is wide open. From behind his desk Tyson peers up over his spectacles. The face is expressionless. Kruger’s valise is splayed open on the desk, his derby upturned beside it. Tyson sits back and pushes the valise forward as if to display the long revolver nestled there among Kruger’s things.

It’s you, isn’t it. Roland Kruger?

That isn’t loaded, Kruger says.

Yes, I’ve just seen. But what am I to make of this?

The voice is unchanged in pitch but there’s less of it. He seems out of breath—maybe frightened? He seems to have become a fellow of comforts, there’s a sort of blurred softness to his eyes and body, he looks as though he should be wearing slippers. He doesn’t hold himself squared, even now, suspicious. His manner could signify either flippant confidence or exhausted apathy.

Don’t worry, Lieutenant, I’ve been involved in something of a war, in Mexico, and I mean to return there. I may need the pistol again then.

But why did you come
here
, Mr Kruger? How did you know where to find me?

I got news of your fortunes, even there.

Fortunes
. Mocking, it must sound. Which was not his intention, he feels.

Sit down again if you like, Mr Kruger.

Thank you, Lieutenant.

Tobacco?

I have some of my own, thank you.

A war in Mexico, Tyson says, relighting his pipe. I thought you were a, what was it, a pacifist objector … ?

I found I objected even more to certain other things. Germany isn’t involved down there? I have no idea.

The, ah, German Empire is one nation we watch carefully, here at the department. They’re becoming a great power, Germany, involved everywhere.

This little speech sounds perfunctory. The official position of a department trying to justify its peacetime existence in the face of apathy and budget restraints. Tyson looks vaguely sheepish.

As I suppose you must know, he adds.

I’m relieved they’ve no Indians to exterminate, at least, Kruger says.

You never were an agent for them, were you?

No.

But a thief?

I was something of a thief, I guess. Though not in the way you believed.

But … you’ve come back here to offer me a duel?

Kruger searches his face. The remark sounds like Tyson’s all right, but the avuncular beard, skunked with grey, has a faintly smiling look.

I’m not sure why I had to come here, Kruger says.

I drew my conclusions under great duress, Mr Kruger, and I wrote that book in a great hurry. I may have been slightly intemperate. Unjust to you in certain ways. … Tyson is talking downward into the open valise, holding his pipe.

He closes the valise.

After a silence Kruger says, It no longer matters, Lieutenant, but I am grateful for your words. And now if you’ll accept mine: on our worst night out there, you were a true hero.

Tyson looks up with rheumy eyes, seeming to will himself to believe.

You seem quite peaceful now, Lieutenant.

I think so, yes—I’ve made my peace with the world. Tyson sits forward over the closed valise; he is almost animated. I did it by
surrender
, you know. Unconditional surrender. Surrender can be a wonderful thing, after all. Too few seem to know that. Of course it’s not something to say out loud in the Navy Department—surrender is frowned on here! He grins, really grins. I’m sorry to hear that you’re still having to fight, down there. You look as though you’d been through some tough scrapes.

My one knack seems to be surviving disasters.

I’m glad your luck is holding.

Frankly it’s a bit of a curse. Kruger takes his pipe from his jacket pocket, reconsiders, then drops it back in.

Lieutenant, I must ask about Tukulito. Hannah. About her and her husband.

Tyson’s stare is locked and unblinking, his lips bitten in his beard.

Ah, says Kruger, his heart plummeting.

I don’t suppose there’s any way you could have known.

Ach, Gott!

I’m sorry to give the news.

After some moments Kruger says, in a flat voice, Maybe I did know, somehow. For years, down in La Paz, I didn’t write to her, because I had a place there, a family, but also because of my fear for her. If you write from a place like that, you can’t be certain the letter will ever reach its home, can you, so then you may get no reply. Which then will make you wonder if the person you fear for may be dead.

These few words may be the most he has said at one time since leaving Purificación. He looks up. Tyson’s attentive eyes are spliced to his.

By not writing to her after a certain point, I was helping to keep her alive. By not pursuing my questions when I met an old woman down there who knew of her, I helped to keep her alive. By coming north to visit once more, I helped to keep her alive—how could anyone be so thoughtless as not to be there to greet a visitor who has come two thousand miles? And by saying nothing to you until just now—by taking your silence about her as hopeful—I hoped to keep her alive.

I wish your superstition had worked.

When did it happen?

Not long after Punnie’s death.

I feared it, at the time, Kruger says.

It was early June. Twelve years ago.

And Ebierbing?

Tyson frowns, and for a moment Kruger is sure that he too must be dead.

I can’t say. He came back south just as I was sailing north in ’77, for the last time. He stayed in the house in Groton and did odd jobs around town, and often he tended the graves, I hear. Next spring he signed over the house to the Budingtons and went north with another expedition. I must have passed him again at sea, or nearly. It was an expedition to turn up relics of Franklin, which they managed to do, even after so long. A grand success. (Tyson doesn’t pronounce the words bitterly—though not without irony, either.) Joe served them well, I guess, but I didn’t pay much attention to news of it. I’d lost interest in the sea and the Arctic by then … like you, I suppose?

Yes, mostly.

He remarried up there—in fact, within a year. They say he gave his new wife the name Hannah.

To have remarried so fast! Kruger says thoughtfully.

One could do worse, Tyson says with a pinch of his old touchiness. Kruger is about to assure him that the remark is not personally aimed when Tyson adds, more softly, If you heard about me, down in Mexico, you likely know about the divorce.

Kruger nods, then looks at the photograph beside Tyson’s desk. Your new family?

That portrait is eight years old. Ned is almost eleven now. The twins are nine, Flora and Hannah. Yes, Hannah.

Studying the photograph Kruger says, And all’s well with your old family, I hope?

They’re well enough. George Junior is a man now—almost nineteen.

Tyson is short of breath again.

And will he go to sea?

No. He’s gone west, out to Idaho. Haven’t spoken to him in some years. He means to do the very opposite of everything I’ve done, that’s plain as sunrise.

But he’s nineteen, Kruger says—not a man yet, really. Around his age I enlisted in the Prussian navy, partly to spite my own father. He may return to you, I think.