Far Bright Star (9 page)

15

W
HEN HE AWOKE
were pink traces of morning. The sun was breeching the horizon. A thin aqueous light was appearing in the east. The vein of light expanded and then was a snap of light and the sun risen and he lay in a parlor of sun, the shining tracks of virga filling the sky, lifting and decorating the sunlight, the magnificent structure of light all around him.

He was lying naked in the center of a vast playa, a dry flat lake bed. He was wrecked in a godforsaken place. This was not the land of humidity and decomposition, but the place of the sun shriveled and the dried-up. It was the vast dusty hollow of a bowl-like valley where he lay and surrounding him were endless miles of sand and windswept earth, high blue mountains, and deep ravines. He knew this land like the palm of his hand, but this day he had no idea where he was. He tried in vain to roll over, to stretch his hand beyond his body, but he could not.

His years on earth became dreamlike to him, a flash of moments experienced and without chains of interlocking experiences. When he remembered he did not see himself, but saw what was before him when it was before his eyes. For all that he’d experienced he was not there but was here and was the watcher and seeing it in his mind and placing it in his memory without remembering all the way to now and now was the only time that mattered.

And, for now, he had to keep what small life he possessed inside himself. He could not let it leave his being. He knew he would be found. His brother would travel in violence to find him. His brother would not give up, not ever, and for that reason he had an obligation to be found or his brother would search the desert until he died.

So, he determined, it was his duty to be found and his brother would find him. Or First Sergeant Chicken. Or Ten Square. Or Teddy.

If Teddy couldn’t find him, nobody could. Teddy’s conviction in pursuit, was like the hunting dog, efficient, alert, single-minded. He was an Apache. As a little boy he stood with Victorio at Tres Castillos. Seventy-two were killed and two hundred wounded were left to die. The rest: men, women, and children were rounded up and with lassos around their necks were marched into Chihuahua and paraded though the city with Victorio’s head on a lance. Then they were marched to a reservation north of the international line.

The Apache used no map, no compass, no star to guide them. He could not figure it out for the longest time until he began to understand they were never lost because they never came from anywhere in the first place and were never going anywhere in the end. They were the place they were in.

It made sense to him, the anciently nomadic and wandering. If you were in a place where you did not belong, then you died, and after thousands of years the only ones who were left alive were the ones who were always where they belonged. He’d have to ask Teddy about this theory when they found him. He’d asked the Apache before and every time he did they only laughed. So complete were they in their being they did not even understand the questions he was asking them. In their language, they possessed no equivalent for the word lost.

If Xenophon did not find him, he would be so angry. Lord knows what he would do. He would scour the entire world and would not stop even after all hope was without and Teddy too would never give up, because Teddy was their friend.

“By God,” Napoleon cried out, his mind unraveling inside his head. He knew he was about broken and needed to find what small piece of him that was still whole or he would perish and if he did—his brother would be so angry with him for being the reason an intention went unfulfilled.

By some effort he sat up. He looked for a sign, whatever sign he could find, however slim and without hope it might be. There was a bird flying west and the earth seemed inclined that way. West was the closest outcropping of rock. Where there was rock, where a bird flew, there could be a seep of water.

If he was to make it through this day, his mind would have a lot of convincing to do. He was naked and streaked with dust and covered with sweat and blood. His flesh was torn and deep bruises were rising beneath his skin. He needed to get more dusty if he was to survive the rays of this day’s sun and the intensifying cold of another night. He touched at his umbered skin, how hot it already was.

He saw his hat not far off, in the same direction as the bird flew. For some reason they’d left him his hat. It was their joke, their invitation to him. It was the chance they afforded him and his slimmest hope. He took it as a sign that it could be done with only this hat the slightest edge.

He scraped away at the earth’s surface with his bare hands until he found the cooler earth beneath. He dusted his skin with handfuls from head to toe, trying to mask his naked skin from the sun. He stood precariously and shook himself. It was a motion he regretted as it caused a slopping inside his head that dropped him back to his knees. His head was heavy and leaden and he was dizzied. His body never weighed so much before. He let himself down onto his hands and knees. His mind whimpered with signals to stand, to move a foot, a hand, to keep his head from lolling on his neck. He tried to make words, but he could not. Whoever struck him the blows to his head struck him that hard.

He stood again and walked over to his hat and by habit he kicked it before picking it up. Who knows what might have crawled under it during the night? He discovered they’d left him another item of his person, the holstered .45 and a single chambered bullet. The decision was his to make.

His only fear was dying alone and, until now, never by his own hand. This concern he confessed to himself this morning, but now he understood—you always die alone.

He drew relief from this. He told death he was ready and had no fear and inside was the preknown of his mind, was the kindling of an innocent curiosity about the life of death, the state of one’s death existence and then it flamed and he was desperately curious about the end of this life and the beginning of the next one. He understood he did not care any longer and he took this as a good sign.

No matter, he had to get off this griddle before he burned away. His body was as if lit and transparent with its whiteness and prey to the sun’s lighted rays. He touched at his burning skin, how hot it was. He had to move in a direction before the sun poisoned his head and burned his body and killed him. He needed to make it to the low sullen mountains to the west. These are the things he told himself to make himself stand up.

Erect and unsteady, he held himself at the vertical on his wavering legs. His head split with dizziness and ribboned light and gorge rose into his throat.

Lead with the left foot, he told himself. The left foot is the leading foot.

He took the first step and fell to his knees and keeled forward, groaning and scraping his face. He stood back up and this time he did not wait but took a step and then another step and he began to walk again.

Double-time, he thought into his legs. Thirty-inch steps. One hundred and eighty steps per minute.

Quick-time cadence, he thought. One hundred and twenty steps per minute.

Under that cloudless sky the earth heated until overhead the burning sun was as if intent on melting the everything beneath. What little fluid his body sweated he desperately licked from his palm and swabbed with dirt to darken his skin. Still, his skin baked as the sun shot its long bars of light from that cloudless blue sky.

His wounds were awakened and became heated knots on his back and every time he tried to move, ever so slightly, his head pounded with the drum of pain.

Who was the great magician who struck this heat? He could go no farther. He found the faint hourglass of a shadow and lay down in its darkness among the creosote bush. As the shadow emptied and filled he rested and then he got up and moved again, ever closer to the high overhanging rocks in the distance. He would go until he was up against them and their stark barren walls clipped off the sun and there would be water and soon the nighttime would overtake the day and there he would find relief.

He sighed deeply, his mind not yet his own, but less disconsolate. He’d decided he’d have a little more life to live this day. But the feeling did not last for long as the sun had already poisoned him. His roiling gut lurched and on all fours he heaved drily as if a dog retching grass. He wanted the pain to stop, wanted his mind to arrest what was involuntary and again assert itself over his body’s continual motion. But his mind could do little to gain control and so finally, mercifully, it passed him out.

For a time he lay there unconscious in the sand and dirt as if driftwood and waiting to be washed off with the next tide.

Then he got up again and trudged on. He was thirst on legs. His feet were shredded of nerves and had ceased their torment, no longer translating pain into his legs. They’d gone numb from the burn and the cuts, the thorns and slivers, they collected with every step. He’d walked and ridden and sailed the whole world. What was a night, a day, a night, however long before his brother found him? Breathless and faint he kept on in his direction. Far off and high up in the sky were the delicate strands of virga. It was raining up there but would evaporate and never reach the ground.

He went down on his knees in the dry dust, his lungs gasping for air. His eyes burned with dry tears and he made fists with his hands, clenching them and releasing and clenching again. He wondered on the winged horse that pulled the golden eye of heaven. He thought how his brother would love to ride that horse on its daily reckless flight.

By an effort he made his way onto his legs again. The sun’s radiant light was coming from all directions. The sun’s rays came directly into him or reflected off the ground. He felt them on his skin and in his eyes and they strained and his eyesight weakened. He was so tired, but he knew he had to find shelter. Through the heat shimmer rising off the desert floor he could see the mountain range so close. He knew he had to get to those rocks and rest and then to the mountain range beyond. And so foot by foot he marched in the direction of the rocks. Where there are rocks there might be more rocks and where there are more rocks there is shade and there might be water splitting the rocks.

They didn’t break him; they couldn’t have. They broke him; they must have. He sought the strong force that always resided within him and he always depended upon, but he could not find it. Staggering, dazed and vacant eyed he stumbled in what direction he did not know. His lips and tongue were swollen, his feet like dead stones at the ends of his legs. He felt the ebbing of his muscular strength. His weary joints gave way and he went down on his knees. Then he walked on his knees. He felt himself to be crossing a field of burning broken glass until he fell forward and then he was stranded on the burning glass. I will die alone, he thought.

“Stand up,” he whispered. “Stand up.”

“I can’t,” he said.

Then he heard his father’s voice calling his name. It came full and complete as if a wind behind it. Not a wind, but something, and he looked around.

The westering sun in the smoke blue air was sad and terrifying and the changing image night was closing in on the eastern horizon. With darkness would come a moment of relief and then he would fight against the freezing cold. He heard his father’s voice again saying his name. His father was telling him what he could not remember, but he knew it was his father and he knew the words he was saying, but he could not remember them.

When he woke up he knew his father had been with him. It was twilight and a full moon was rising in the southeast. The slanting light was slowly giving way to the moon’s vast rising and milky umbra. With the gathering murk of night he pulled himself from his sandy den and stood erect. A dry prickly heat spread through his body. In the half light he stared into the distance. He watched for birds in the sky. Waited for the slimmest pattern to show the direction to water.

Soon he would be on the night side of the earth. He’d find his way. He’d begin to walk again.

It wasn’t long before the sky was fully dark and the moon so bright it washed the sky and the white and spangled Milky Way was made invisible.

He took his bearings in the sky. Almost straight overhead he found the bright star Vega and with Deneb and Altair he made the Summer Triangle. In the east he found the Pegasus, the winged horse, and to the northwest, the Big Dipper was rising from the horizon line. When he was a boy the Big Dipper was always visible, but in Mexico it rose and set nightly.

He found Polaris, the North Star, the far bright star, where every night it sat nearly still at twenty-five degrees above the northern horizon. True north he calculated and in his mind he saw the map grid. There were 17.7 miles to a degree. He needed east and he needed north and he needed west. In his mind he saw grid east and grid north and grid west. Overhead the glinting stars were fixed in the heaven. He was cold, but he’d have to keep moving.

“I’m ready,” he told his father, and his father heartened him.

He looked again to the moon and how strange it was. It was as if a little bite had been taken from it. Then, slowly, more and more of the moon grew darker until after a while three-fourths of the lunar disk was deep in coppery eclipse. The Milky Way revealed itself and he could see the great star clouds of Sagittarius. After that the umbraled moon began to reclaim its round shape and it grew again and the Milky Way faded away.

Beneath the star-scattered sky, he began walking again.

16

T
HE BEGINNING OF
the next day brought the rednecked vultures. They stood away in their watch but close enough he could see their black flitting eyes. A creeping murmur came from their wattled gravelly throats, a sad gesture that made the rounds and then they silenced again. He would be their food. They had all the time in the world.

The ball of fire that was the sun loomed on the horizon. He was lying on a rocky stretch of ground. He’d gotten himself this far, but from where and how much farther was his destination? So like a man to wake up where he didn’t know and didn’t remember and still think it progress.

He felt himself, his senses, alternately sharp and then dull. For a time his vision disappeared and he could not see and when his sight returned he looked across a vast open area of complete emptiness. He was experiencing a burning unendurable thirst and try as hard as he could he could not remember when last he had a drink of water. His chin sank to his chest and he staggered. His mind was growing confused—he knew. He swept his eyes over the whole horizon. A shimmering vision of water rose in the path of his destination. As the sun climbed higher, the illusion evanesced.

We only have one death to break through to enter the eternity of all time, he thought. Just one death and then we are free forever.

I must live, he thought. I still think I can and I still think there is a reason to.

He was closer to the rocks he’d seen yesterday, but yesterday’s effort had taken a terrible toll on his being. He could not remember when yesterday was.

Just lie quiet, he told himself. Find something to think about.

It was a time not so many years ago, crossing the Lolo Pass and stopping and squaring the Rockies with his thumb and forefinger. One of the jerk-offs joked about pissing on the Divide, whether he wanted to piss in the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific.

“Because you know,” he said, “from here it goes one way or the other.”

Those were the good times with the last of the old hands, wild horses, wild cattle, lions, wild hogs. Still some grizzly roaming at night under a forest of stars.

He remembered the ride over the Divide, the steep rocky trail into the beautiful and wooded high country, the tall pines, oak, cedar, and juniper. The quaking aspens. They campaigned at seven thousand feet in storms of hail and snow. What he would trade for a little of that cold right now.

He climbed onto his legs and began walking. He stopped and sniffed the air for the ripe smell of water and then continued on through the brittle scrub. He was sorely tired and knew he had to stop eventually, but he also knew sleep was a black hole from which he feared he would not recover and so he staggered through the boundless emptiness like a drunken sleep walker. He continued on toward the low sullen mountains. He had no mind to divert his attention, no mind to receive the delivered news of the pain he must have been feeling.

He suddenly felt the presence of a stranger beside him and avoided his gaze, turning his head, not looking into his eyes. The stranger was beside him, or behind him and only his shadow was cast to prove his presence. But to turn to him, to look at him would mean death. It would mean to be taken in his embrace and gentled from this place, this earth and into another. He did not know how he knew this. He just did.

“I’d rather not go just yet,” he said to the stranger.

For all the horror of this world it was still his own and he was not done and he’d not give himself over. He began to beat his arm as if swatting a fly, a bite, an affliction of the skin and deep in his throat sourced a keening wail, the jabber of the insane, and the stranger was driven back for the time.

But why not go with the stranger? He touched at the .45. Why not speed the death that would be the transition? Why not give up the pain, the injury, the slow and terminal? He worried and fretted how cool his skin had become. He understood how at the end a freezing man felt alive with heat and a drowned man could breathe and a burning man became cold and shivered and then died.

Why live when you could die? Who can answer that question and have the answer not be the selfishness you feel for the life that is your own?

He understood God to be fierce and prideful and taunting and these were the aspects of himself that God made in man. In his secret mind he speculated that worship and prayer and prostration offended God and made him weary. The daily freight of the thousand-million prayers rising from the hulled earth and converging on God’s ears must have filled God with loathing and disgust so long ago, all those simpering, greedy prayers.

Each time he stopped to take his bearings the mountains seemed to have moved. He could not tell if he was headed toward them or headed toward their ghost image refracting in the warmer air above the desert floor. He sat down and rested his head on his knees, his arms holding his legs. He listened to the murmuring air and the sifting land, the profound stillness of this outer landscape.

He knew his brother would kill to find him. Nothing would stop him.

He closed his eyes and when he opened them, he stood, he adjusted accordingly and he continued on his slow torturous path.

It was then he understood why they let him live. It was to haunt the others, to confuse them, to tell them what happened to him. They let him go back because he would not be good for the others in any way. His living would confuse their minds and sow discontent.

Maybe he wasn’t worth killing. He took only mild offense at the thought. What did he care? He was grateful for their disdain.

He arrived at consciousness to the sound of beating wings. He’d been walking unconscious, unaware that he was even walking. He heard his father’s voice again, as if from a great distance come through the shield of heat and the dust and the noise the heat made inside his head.

Dragging a cross, on a desolate plain, he imagined the Jesus, blood dripping from his spiked crown. Inside he was drying up. He felt the touch of death and he began to not care if he lived and for a time this invigorated him. What was death to him? Just another unreal and meaningless experience.

He was now like the ghost of a ghost wandering.

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.
He heard these words.
Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit to full height.
His father was talking and had been doing so before he came to consciousness.

I am the lion in your blood
—his father’s words appearing in his mind and telling themselves to him and then vanishing and he could not remember them, but he knew it was his father.

He craned his neck and stared blindly into the sun. He remembered a spring in the pine timber country and another one that rose from the stony ground in little pools. How white and relentless the sky furnace. Sweating, panting, shivering out his life in the violent light he kept on.

He began talking to his mind and gently chastising it as if it were a recalcitrant child. His grandmother told him the blue darners were called the devil’s needle because they sewed shut the eyes and nose and mouth of disobedient children. He wondered how much of the mind was only memory?

Then it was a seep he found, a dry rock wall he came to with a seam of water. From the seep a thin stream trickled into a calciformed stone that overbrimmed and lipped and disappeared. The water soothed his parched mouth and cooled his blood when he mopped his neck. He could not believe he found it and was on the verge of tears. At ease, he thought as he rested in shadow under the veil of rock where he’d found water like an angel.

At dusk the full moon began its rise in the crepuscular light and its glowing would last the entire of that night until it set at dawn. Tonight would be a moonshining night, the moon’s light like cast fabric and so tonight maybe he would be found.

He let himself lie back, the .45 at his right hand. The heavens were on fire this night. The wide vessel of the universe was as if a land aflame with torches. There were stabs of fire in the sky, as if windblown, and he wondered what they were, each in their candlelike moment spectacularly magnificent. It was the kind of thing he’d have commented upon if he’d been with someone. He wondered if anyone else on earth saw them. He’d try to remember them to ask when he was found if anyone else saw the stabs of fire.

Then for a time the night was a belt of total darkness and a womb and there was infinite silence and the world took on the blackness of hell. Figures, indistinct and formless, wandered here and there in his vision. There came a period of thunderless lightning in the sky. At first the lightning meandered and striated and then broke to horizontal in fractured structure. The lightning beaded and pearled in long crackling chains that curled and whipped. The strokes dissolved into countless luminous segments and long lines of bright strands or exploded like rockets with splays of innumerable fingers. Then there would be a leader and another leader and leaders followed leaders. The leaders stepped and by return stroke in the opposite direction they established a channel that seemed to simultaneously pour down into the earth and return to the heavens.

Then what was happening up there stopped and the night returned to itself.

Perhaps there’d been a short war in heaven. A revolt of the saved and ascended and they wanted to come back down to earth and be men and women again and were sick of being God’s angels. He wondered, Is it possible to capture some kind of truth before you die? To learn what is behind the surface and to learn the secret of everything that matters?

He held to the slender thread he was hanging by. He’d found water and now he’d live to be found by his brother. They say a man must have something to live for. Is being saved from death enough of a reason? Watch for a falling star. Make a wish it happens soon.

If I get that lucky I’ll drink until I drown, he told himself. He thought about God and how he had exercised his overwhelming advantage and yet, he was still alive. This was the time for God to cut a deal if he was so inclined.

“Make me an offer,” he throat-whispered. “If you want me, make me an offer, you son of a bitch.”

That night he dreamed it was a very cold day and he remembered how much chilblains hurt after staying out too long, riding the toboggan with his brother.

Together they careened down the Copperhead Road, as if riding a thin margin of the world. The snow was blank white and banked in turns and when the road dropped they caught the air and flew and whumped down and he bit his lip, but it was so cold the blood froze on his chin. When they hit the bridge floor the rough slivered planks dragged them to a stop. Running beneath them were the white tails of fast moving water. They were looking at each other and seeing each other and without separateness, as if between them was the same miraculous power that holds water together. No two people can occupy the same space, the same event, the same moment, yet they did, and he remembered how beautiful the cast light in his brother’s face.

Then they trudged back up the mountain and did it all over again until there was nothing left in their young bodies and they tramped home and curled up by the copper flames.

They were their father’s boys and their mother’s awkward animals. Cast in the parlor stove were lions’ heads and there was a long wooden pipe that carried water to the kitchen from the hot spring. The water smelled of sulfur.

Their father said, “The cold is good for you,” and their chilblains throbbing in their feet and hands and thin ankles, they fell asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace.

His memories were vague and gray. He heard a tap on a window blurred with rain. He saw the photo of a woman’s oval face and a shocking abundance of black hair. His mother.

“I have had such awful dreams,” his mother said. She was holding a biscuit cutter.

“People should be left alone,” she said.

That spring the enchanted weather was wind running with banks of mist that rose in the hollows. Spring was a necklace of leaves and in summer he liked to feel the grass under his feet when he walked the plashy meadows and rambled the sun-swept hillsides, the coal black horses an otherness on the land.

They had two pet geese and the geese were blind. In the fall they set the blind geese in the upland pond where they swam and the geese called in the hour before daylight. They waited in a place in the trees called a blind, their faces bathed by a delicate mist, and when the wild geese flew in they rose up and shot them and that same night they ate them.

When he woke up it was still dark. He could feel a growing intimacy for the place he occupied. A scroll of traveling lightning wavered in the darkness.

“Is this the mystery of death?” he said, looking around, speaking his words into the vacancy and mumbling a reply and not remembering what he was talking about with himself.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I think so,” he said.

“Your eyes?” he said, but to these questions he was asking himself he had no answers.

“Please don’t talk,” he said, feeling stiffness about the eyes.

“I never used to be afraid of dying.”

“Me neither.”

“It’s not your time, I promise.”

“Please, I just want to lie here and not talk.”

“Then go back to sleep,” he said.

However strange his lostness was to him he persisted in knowing he would live to be found.

Then the night sky spangled with milky light. It seemed to fall from the pallid stars as if poured from glass and all the way down to earth and he again allowed himself the thought he would make it, but with thoughts of the future were attendant memories of what happened in the desert and he could not keep them quiet in his conscience. He felt the weight of a knotted sorrow and however hard he thought it away, this heavy weight he could not lift from his heart.

He knew there would be more war because he knew by law of nature men would to war. All the young men were on fire to cross the ocean and fight. They were bloodthirsty for the blood that was not their own. Like little boys, they would have it and the old men would let them have it and it would turn out widows and orphans and heartbroken mothers. They would weep and moan for their husbands, fathers, and lovers. After the war was before the war.