Beyond the Horizon (21 page)

He awoke with a start and lay in the darkness of the tunnel, gasping for air as if he had been running from something.

The stranger was met with a mixture of distrust and admiration by the survivors of Fort James. For some he was a folk hero—able to vanquish the last of the redskinned niggers; he had killed the ugly cuss with the bone outfit. Some of the soldiers, to save face, dismissed his actions as insignificant. ‘We wouldve killed em when they came after us,' they said. ‘He was just there first, thats all.' Still a few more, both soldier and civilian, wondered what he'd said to the Chief. ‘They looked to be friends,' the lieutenant said. ‘Chattin it up.' Others rebutted that the end result was the same—a dead nigger and no more injuns.

When he first entered the fort, the soldiers stepped back and let him through the passage. He drank from a trough in the courtyard, asked where all the villagers had
gone.

‘Done bin killed by the niggers,' a soldier said. ‘Few went down into the mines. Few come out, but there was a cave-in and most all them was buried alive.'

The stranger nodded knowingly. ‘Anyone in charge?'

‘That was the commandante—the old soldier.'

‘No one else in line?'

The soldier exchanged glances and shrugs with the other soldiers. ‘Cant say there
is.'

‘Then youre free,' the stranger said. He smiled. ‘You dont have to answer to anyone.'

The lieutenant walked over. ‘Need to stay organized,' he said. ‘Those Apache niggers is bound to come this way agin.'

The stranger shook his head. ‘Not if there isnt one to tell them to. We killed every last one of them. No need to stay enlisted. This is our place
now.'

‘Our place?' the lieutenant asked. ‘Where'd you come from, stranger?'

A smile, big and toothy, curled the stranger's lips. ‘Ever had a dream so real you woke up confused?'

The soldier's brow screwed and he said he supposed he did, least he thought he might have when he was a child.

‘Thats how I woke this morning,' the stranger said. ‘Dreamt right into existence.'

‘You always talk in riddle?'

Above him the space was vast and endless, stretching out into nothing but a depthless black. The man outstretched his hand and touched the ceiling of soil and rock. He imagined the stars spiraling around the stratosphere, blips of comets and meteorites. He opened and shut his eyes and saw no difference.

He burrowed back into the pile of rocks, a space only wide enough for his torso. Air did not circulate readily as he worked and the space became hot and stuffy, the stink of wet earth and sweat. He backed out by wiggling his hips and pushing with his elbows, taking care not to hit his head against the ceiling above. Once free of the tunnel, he sat up and gasped for air. Even the cave air, stale and mortared, seemed fresh now. After a couple minutes, he sighed and crawled back into the narrow passage. He did this a number of times, even sleeping briefly between digging sprees.

Finally he felt a tumble of stones give way on the other side and his hand stretched out into a void of much cooler air. Though many men's eyes play tricks on them when there is nothing there, this man thought he saw a wash of light spill through the tiny hole. He dug more feverishly, no longer concerned about breathing with the channel now properly vented.

Soon he had scooped and pushed enough of the earth aside that he could fit through. He pulled the lower half of his body, confined by the narrowness of the passageway, by walking forward on his hands. Pressure from the tunnel he'd dug seemed to be pressing down on his legs. He kicked. Some stones rattled and fell. He pulled himself free and listened to the thump of the tunnel falling in on itself. A mist of dirt rushed through the air, covering the man in a fresh and even layer of grit. Still, he lay gasping on the floor of the mine. Dirt stuck to his teeth and gummed up his tongue. He used the back of his hands to rub the sediment from his eyes. But it was to no avail; his hands were too dirty. He blinked rapidly.

Yes, there was a difference now—something not easily distinguished: there was light in here. Not much, but light, in the way it can find the most desolate corners of the world, had found this place. Though it was much cooler in this section of the mine, the man thought it to be much warmer. He laughed out loud and it echoed in the stone corridors. Then he called out for help, asked if there was anyone who could hear him. He waited for a reply after the echo and its many iterations had faded into nothing.

He stood, one hand over his head in case the ceiling was too low. He straightened up tall and realized this was the main shaft, the only one with a height great enough to accommodate the average miner. For a moment, he tried to figure out how this was possible. He and the other miners had gone into the farthest recesses of the tunnels to make their way into the old mine the cripple had found. Surely there was no shorter way to go. The man called it quits and began staggering toward the source of the light. He imagined it must be a short ways ahead.

The office of the commandante remained untouched. While the survivors of what was now called the Injun massacre looted the homes of the dead and burned the bodies in pyres, they did not disturb the officers' quarters. Not a single soldier so much as thought to step foot inside the commandante's office. Perhaps it was superstition. The stranger knew where the quarters was located. His first night in the fort, when he slept in the bunkhouse, in the very same bed the man had occupied just a day before, he fell to sleep examining the ceiling. The wood was darkened a bit. Any layman could tell it was a water stain. The stranger looked at the stain, at the swirled grains of the wood, the warp and weft. He examined the head of a nail popping out from where the beam and slat met. Then he closed his eyes and followed the trajectory of the nail, how it held fast into the wood, held in by forces of friction. Beyond here was the roof, a tin roof rusted through in spots by the rain which came only in short spurts, the dust snow of winter lasting much longer. When the snows melted, they trickled off the low edge, pooled in the divots and ate at the metal.

From this one point in time and space, he calculated what the entire rest of the fort looked like. He could see the foyer of the office with its great leather chairs and bearskin rug. In his mind he saw the shape and make of the desk, each drawer. He traveled into the keyhole and saw the pins and tumblers within, knew how to unlock the contents inside. The glass cabinets with their brass knobs where the books were stored. Each book with its own story. Instantly he knew every word, he knew the characters and where they came from in the author's life, when and where the writer sat when these things first spawned into existence.

But there was one book that, as the stranger lay thinking about it, caused a dark spot in his mind. Whatever this book contained, it was not a story, nor words. No, this was something different. He resolved to explore it in the morning.

He shifted in the bed, in the spot the man had worn in the mattress. It caused him to wonder about the man. He tried to postulate the man's location. Like all the other civilians of the fort, the man had gone down into the mines. That much the stranger knew. Again he interpolated what the world looked like. The darkest corners of the manmade caves were illuminated in his mind. He could easily see each crevice, every fold in the stone. Then he came to a place where the laws of geology and physics broke down, where he could not imagine what lay there. The limits of the expanded mind are still confined to this world; the worlds we imagine beyond this one are built from the bones and waste of the places we've already
used.

The stranger sat up and looked around the bunkhouse. Some men murmured in their sleep. Some simply just dreamt. At the far end of the house a pan with a twisted rag as a wick burned melted fat. The stranger pulled on his boots and went out into the night.

The door of the commandante's office had been left unlocked, the things inside untouched. For as long as any one of them could remember, the commandante had been there. He existed before anyone ever came upon Fort James. Even though they saw him killed, saw his body cut into pieces and burned, the soldiers who worked under him refused to believe he was
dead.

‘No,' the lieutenant said to his fellow soldiers. ‘The commandante is more than a
man.'

‘What is he?' another asked.

‘Cant rightly say. Whatever he is though, he dont
die.'

Whatever acts the commandante had committed in his lifetime became amplified in the recounting. As the men drank and talked, they built a new image of their slain leader. In doing so, they sanctified what he did and hallowed the places he occupied. Years later, men would do the same to the likes of Custer and Jackson—great men known for attempted genocide. Years earlier entire nations were wiped out by heroes like Cortés and Pizarro. They were beatified by history and elevated into a status of savior.

The office was as the stranger had imagined it. What little light there was came from starlight radiating in through the windows. The stranger circled the desk and sat in the chair. He opened the drawer with the keys and took them out. Then he turned to the glass-doored bookcase and unlocked it. His fingers ran along the cloth bindings of the books and stopped on a wide-spined tome without a label.

He pulled the book from the shelf and laid it on the desk with a dull thump. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he could see there was nothing written in the way of a title. Digging his fingernails into the stack of pages, he opened the book and found nothing. The center of the pages had been cut out to accommodate something. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. He swore to himself. For some time he just stood, leaning, hands flat on the desktop, staring down into the vacant sockets of this
book.

Then, as metanoias happen, he came to understand what had been set before him. He stood up straight, rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and reached down into the hollowed space of the book. Inside it was cool and damp. He reached in farther, past his elbow. He stifled a burst of laughter and thrust his arm deeper, until his ear pressed against the desktop. He strained his arm and stretched his fingertips. In his mind, he imagined what artifacts of the world the commandante created he might find. He felt something soft, almost furry. He pinched part of it between his index and middle finger and pulled it from the
book.

He set the dead bird on the desk. It was half decayed. For a moment, he stared blankly at it. Then his shoulders began to shake. Hiccups of laughter spilled out and soon his whole body shook.

He reshelved the book, locked the cabinet, and put the lanyards of keys around his neck. All these worlds, all these places that all of him had been to, were so beautiful he could hardly contain himself.

The man thought what he might say to his woman when he saw her again. He practiced words over and over again. Knowing that she understood little of his language, the man practiced what he would do with his hands, where he would direct his eyes. He spoke out loud and practiced his intonation.

‘I done been round the world,' he said. ‘The only place worth comin back to was you.' He thought he would take her hand, squeeze it. If she understood, she would lean in and kiss
him.

He stumbled over some loose stones that made for poor footing. After a few more steps he said, ‘I wont ever leave you again.' The echo of his voice resounded in resoluteness.

He tripped again and noticed the footing here was different than it had been. The clamor and scattering of stones was not present. He reached down and felt something cold and wet. What light there was barely exposed the vestiges of a miner, the wet flaps of skin and scalp. Nearby a wooden beam was splintered so the end flared out like the bristles of a broom. Bones and hair tangled in the fibers. The man vomited on the remains. He apologized, shook his head and staggered
on.

He came around a bend and the light amplified. He squinted and his head pulsated in response to the surge of brightness. After letting his eyes adjust, he opened them and realized he stood at the bottom of the lift shaft. Ropes and timbers, bodies and rags of clothing littered the shaft. At the top the scaffolding obscured most of the daylight beyond. What shafts of light that did appear cut through the dust and vapor. It looked like the man could reach out and grab a hold of
one.

‘I wanted to give up,' the man said. ‘Wanted to lay down an die. But then I'd think of you. I'd keep on goin.' He imagined the woman would understand, tears might well up in her eyes and she would say something back, letting it tumble out in that Mexicano language of
hers.

He grabbed a rope that dangled from a beam about fifty feet up. He placed his foot into a pocket in the rock. He began climbing. He used the ropes and supports. Once or twice he trusted an unsturdy foothold and nearly fell. After he ascended a couple hundred feet, he wanted to stop. His shoulders ached from being raised for so long. His fingers cramped and went numb. The closer he got to the surface, the colder it became. At one point, he highstepped his foot up onto a beam that stretched from one side of the shaft to the other. He shoved all his weight onto the booted foot and heard the nail pop through the sole before he felt the blister of pain. He howled in agony. But he had already begun this motion and he shifted the rest of his weight forward, the nail remaining stationary while his foot shifted forward.

Once he had enough support, he lifted his foot off the nail, the thin sole of the boot now greased with blood squeaked as it slid free of the nail. The man looked down, but he could see nothing. Wherever the bottom was no longer mattered. He knew the fall would kill
him.

He kept climbing, the wound in his foot throbbing. He came to a point where there were no longer handholds—not a rope or beam—just a sheer face of rock for a good ten feet. The man craned his head round, saw a metal rod with a pulley on the end sticking out of the wall. He summoned up what strength he could and lunged for
it.