Gods Without Men (33 page)

The mining track ran out and they made their way down a talus slope, picking a path as carefully as they could, the horses placing their feet with the care of tightrope walkers. This was where Deighton’s mount threw him. For two days the nameless bay had been docile; its show of temper in the corral seemed to vanish once they were out in the desert. Deighton was daydreaming, trusting the animal to find the best route down in the gathering darkness, when suddenly it reared up, sending him backward out of his saddle. Instinctively he broke his fall with his hand, twisting his arm beneath him as he landed. The horse kicked out, narrowly missing his head, then skidded some way down the slope,
almost falling as the loose gravel slipped under its hooves. There were yells from farther down, as the lead riders saw rocks bouncing down toward them. The panic spread to animals on either side. A burro, laden down with firewood and provisions, slipped its halter and bolted.

Deighton got to his feet, flexing his wrist, expecting to find it broken. It seemed only to be sprained. A few cuts and bruises and a torn pair of pants was the worst of the damage. He was fixed up by one of Craw’s hands, a grizzled oldster named Silas Henry, who grinned at the world through a set of shiny teeth he claimed he’d crafted himself from gold he’d mined at Skidoo, before the panic wiped him out.

They camped at the foot of the slope. It was a sorry, exposed spot. As the heat fled from the land, a bitter wind started to whip across the plain, picking up sparks from the fire which raced through the air like little comets. The burro’s load of mesquite branches burned quickly, and after a hurried meal everyone made ready for bed, jostling for position near the embers of the fire.

In the violet haze of the early morning, as Deighton drank his coffee and ate his scoop of beans, Waghorn passed by and aimed a kick at his boots.

“I didn’t get no sleep because of you. Goddamn coughing.”

Deighton was too tired and sore to talk back. He thought he was running a fever. The handkerchief stuffed into his inside pocket was soaked with blood.

As dawn broke they put on speed, riding fast over the plain until they were slowed down by the lava field, with its fantastical twists and bubblings. They kept stopping to look through field glasses, but there was no sign of the running Indian. “There’s nowhere for him to go,” pronounced Calhoun, as if by saying it he could make it true. They were low on water, and the horses were tiring. No one was looking forward to another climb. Deighton was glad of each break, pain and fatigue overcoming his fear of what lay at the end of the chase, the resolution to the thing he’d set in motion.

The sun was over the mountains when they saw a mirror flashing many miles to the south. They turned the noses of the horses toward the signal. As they rode Deighton could feel his head dropping forward,
lights twinkling in his mind. He wasn’t sure if the country he was seeing was real anymore. It seemed tentative, mutable. First he found himself on a salt pan, bright white and perfectly flat. Then in high country, where huge boulders rose up between the draws, their shapes like children’s clay models. An elephant. A gas mask. A skull. They passed through a garden of cholla cacti. A hawk flew overhead. When, at last, they stopped, some of the men dug out a creek bed, looking for water. A few feet down, they struck it, a brown brackish trickle, then a steady flow. The horses drank.

He could taste death in that water. That was when he knew they were close.

Soon there were other men. Handshakes and low voices. The second posse had a city fellow with them, a Hearst journalist out of San Francisco, with a camera and a tripod strapped behind his saddle. It’s a big story, he told them. You got yourselves a crazed Indian. Nothing the readers back east like better than a little taste of the wild frontier.

Deighton had no recollection of lying down or going to sleep. The stars overhead formed an inverted bowl, a crystal dome, over his head. Almost at once he was shaken awake. It was still dark. Around him, men were loading guns, saddling horses, making ready.

“We seen his fire. He can’t be more than five miles away.”

They rode across the dry lake through a gray half-light, neither day nor night, but something in between. He felt delirious, ethereal, as if he were no longer completely inside his body. In the distance he saw the three spires of rock and knew that he had come to the threshold, the opening between this world and the Land of the Dead. Up on the rocks was a glow. It didn’t look like firelight, but something else, something spectral and strange.

Oh Lord, he prayed. If you exist, make something happen. I have brought this about, out of jealousy. Lord, save me from the guilt of what is about to happen here.

They sat and they waited. The sun rose high in the sky, but the chill stayed in the air. Deighton watched the sky, and thought he saw things written in it. Secret trails. Wisdom. He wondered who was up on the rocks with Willie Prince. Not a child. How could he have taken
a child up there? But Eliza? Please Lord, he prayed again. Let her not be with him.

The gunfire sounded like boys throwing firecrackers.

The posse had gotten tired of waiting. They moved forward in a crouching run. The figure up on the rocks fired shot after shot. As Deighton watched, Danville Craw went down, clutching his leg. After that they crawled, taking cover as they climbed. It was an unruly, ill-disciplined advance. None of them would survive a minute in the face of those German guns. Do you need me to cut the wire? he asked. No one answered. Unless someone cut a route, they were going to get tangled up in the wire. Up in the sky a pale eye looked down on him. God’s German eye.

That was not where he was. Why had he thought so? That was not where he was at all.

Waghorn was screaming, a continual high-pitched wail.

Deighton stood up. He opened his arms wide to show he was unarmed. He shouted out a greeting.

“Garcés! Fray Garcés! En nombre de Dios!” He repeated it as he walked forward. “Get down, you fool!” yelled Calhoun. Ignoring him, Deighton climbed the path, stepping over Craw, who was lying in the dust, pressing his palms into the bloody wound in his thigh. A bullet ricocheted off the rock at his feet. Then someone tackled him from behind. He sprawled. The ground was ice-cold.

He lay for a long time, straining to catch his breath. He felt as if he were drowning, his lungs filling with sludge, each inhalation coming in a little whistling rasp. He did not know where he was, why he was there. After a while he realized the firing had ceased. From up on the rocks came a ragged cheer.

As slowly as an old man, he stood and trudged his way upward, stopping every few moments to rest. The others had all gone on. Up ahead, at the base of the tallest spire, he saw a sudden flash of magnesium light. Men were clustered around a corpse, laid out on the ground.

“I shot him!” exulted Waghorn. “I got him! A clean kill!” Silas Henry capered about, grinning his big gold grin.

The Hearst man was taking trophy pictures. Waghorn and Calhoun with their rifles crossed, boots on the corpse’s chest; Craw supporting himself on someone’s shoulder, keeping the weight off his bandaged leg. Deighton looked down at the body, its clawed hands, bare feet. It was impossible to tell who it was. The face was blown clean off.

“Who is it?” he asked.

Francisco Lobo looked at him strangely. “No one I ever saw before.”

“Where’s the boy?”

“There weren’t no boy.”

Around them, tired deputies were slapping one another on the back, passing round a bottle. No one seemed to care they’d chased a man for days across the desert, then murdered him without cause. They were victorious hunters. Once the photographs were done, they started to cut brush and pile it over the corpse. Deighton tried to pull it away. He wasn’t sure who was beneath it, but he knew they ought to carry him down, give him a decent funeral. Two of Craw’s hands dragged him off and laid him on the ground. It’s just an Indian, sneered one. He don’t care.

They stepped back and lit the pyre. Deighton watched the circle of unshaven haggard faces staring avidly into the flames.

Covering the grid. The makeup girl was professional, and moved around her without speaking. Neither personal nor impersonal. Just some powder. Mirror-Lisa, framed in bulbs.
Make you look like a person who sleeps
.

Q. Why did you do it? Why would a person behave like that?

Because she wanted to. Not long enough as an answer. People want more. They want explanations that
feel
like explanations.

On the first day they’d flown vectors over the park. Flown tracklines, expanding squares. Walking, they’d swept the area. Go on, said Dawn, out of the shadows. Ask her a question. Judy, sitting in that rocking chair under the bighorn-sheep skull on the wall. Back and forth, back and forth, Navajo blanket on her lap like an old woman. Ask her anything you like.

Impossible to cover all that territory.

Just some powder.

Ma’am, we stopped vehicles, questioned hikers. Everything by the book. At a certain time you have to conclude. At a certain time you have to. At a certain time.

You conclude that this was an abduction and it’s possible the child has been taken across state lines.

There you are. All done.

The land and aerial searches.

The host came in and said hello. She looked older in real life. She looked like a real person. I am so sorry, she said. Jaz was getting made up in the next chair, a white napkin tucked into his collar. Awkwardly, he craned around. Lisa looked at the two women in the mirror, the one leaning over the other. My heart, said the presenter. My personal anger.
The mirror made it easier to see her. It made it easier when she said why don’t we all join hands.

She liked to do that before a special show. A show where we are dealing with life in its rawest form.

Judy rocking in her chair. Had Lisa ever really been in that room, with its triangular windows, its animal-skin rugs and polished floors? Under the dome of the stars. Only the stone hearth and the rocking woman had substance. Everything else dissolved into the shadows.

Side effects may include drowsiness, skin irritation, severe allergic reaction. Stop taking the medication and immediately seek medical help if you have any of the following:

The people in the hallway were her people. She had people. Victim support, Park Service media relations. Her parents had hired a lawyer or maybe an agent. He acted like an agent. His name was Price and he wore western boots under his double-breasted silk suits. He wore monogrammed shirts and talked to her like they were both in a Lifetime movie of the week. When they interviewed him on television, he was described as the “family spokesperson.” Her mother took her aside and started acting strangely and eventually she worked out that she was trying to explain why they’d hired a goy. You don’t know how it is out here, she said. They need to deal with one of their own.

There was a ribbon campaign, briefly. There was a website with a counter and a PayPal button.

In a moment she’d have to speak. The headset girl said they were almost ready for their segment. The girl leaned in very close. Her breath smelled of strawberry-flavored gum. It was strange how they all came in so close. It was like being pregnant, everyone wanting to rub your belly for luck. The little squeezes, the hugs. The holding of the wrists. When you’re making up each step through force of will, creating ground on which to walk, it takes faith. Faith and an atmosphere of silence. People touching or talking to you can throw you off.

Her people. Really they were just there to wheel her about, like a patient on a gurney. She never said a word if she could help it.

Perhaps she could blame the pictures. There’d been a collage of photos behind the bar, groups of smiling young Marines, arms thrown over
one another’s shoulders or fiercely squeezing girls. Over the bar were more photographs, framed black-and-white portraits of heavy-jawed men on plain backgrounds. Down below, everyone had a world—a fragment of counter, stark and shiny in the flash, a car hood, a beer poster, a table and chair. Up there, the heroes floated in the milky-white amniotic fluid of their heroism, safe from harm. The bottles against the smeared mirror, the tangled string of Christmas lights; the place reminded her of a roadside shrine she’d once seen in Mexico. She’d taken pictures while Jaz read out the names on the votive candles.
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Contra el Mal de Ojo y Para Atrear La Fortuna
. How many of these red-eyed bottle wavers were dead? Or had no legs? That was the difference now. Wonders of modern medicine. All coming home with chunks blown out of their brains or PTSD or missing limbs, as if by failing to die they’d also failed to complete a mandatory process, hadn’t followed the correct procedure for their transformation into black-and-white floating heads.

And that was when he came up and asked if she’d like to play a game of pool. It wasn’t complicated. She could already see him as he would be in the future, wheeling himself around. The sideways glances at the mall. The screaming-eagle decal on the chair. It was strange. She’d never had a premonition, but she saw this very clearly.

Maria Dolorosa
.

She thought about the sand in her hair, her sweaty clothes. She took a gulp of her vodka soda.

He repeated his question.

Swelling of the lips, face, throat and tongue. May impair your ability to drive or operate heavy machinery. Some people taking this medication have engaged in activities such as driving or making telephone calls and later have no memory of these activities
.

It was time. She gave herself up to the strawberry-gum girl, floating along with an arm to rest on, a guiding hand in the small of the back. Her own hand was placed in Jaz’s. It lay there, a damp fish on his papery palm. He was talking to her, using a warm tone, his trying-to-reach-you tone. Go toward the light, said the strawberry-gum girl, and launched them on set.

There was applause. The host hugged, patted, performed the holding of the wrists. She smelled of some powerful lilac deodorant. She smelled like an office bathroom. They sat down on the couch.