The Outlander (35 page)

A bloated red sun crept the far ranges. Even two hours after the
avalanche, rocks still bounded downhill, beaming red as they went, deflecting, colliding
with larger boulders and coming to an abrupt halt in a spray of shards.

The widow picked her way over the sharp ground. A boulder leaped ahead of
her, another fell behind her, but she tottered on, charmed. Distantly, she could hear a
sound, a human voice, shrill and insistent, coming closer. And then McEchern was seizing
her round the wrist, his childlike shouting horrible to her ears.

“What in shit's name are you doing?”

Because she wasn't moving fast enough, he dashed behind her and
pushed her rump, impelled her into a trot, hurrying her along, her bare feet leaving
bloody smears on the rocks as she went. Finally he stopped pushing. All of a sudden it
was cool and quiet. Together they stood in the shadow of a massive boulder, several
storeys high. He seized her tattered, open collar and dragged her down to face him.

“You stay here,” he said fiercely, his pudgy finger nearly on
her nose. “
Stay put
, d'you hear?” She nodded meekly. Then he
was gone, running away over the stones as nimble as a goat, one hand raised to keep the
bowler on his head.

The widow sat down heavily and began to inspect her bloodied feet.

“I'm damned sure not dead,” said a voice beside her.

She looked, and there sat a dirty boy she had never seen before. He was
blond, his features rabbity, a wild and crooked grin on his face. His mouth hung open in
near glee as he gazed about him at the desolation. The boy's right arm was laid
across a flat rock beside him. The hand was thickened and blue and there was a dark line
across the forearm where he had broken both bones. When he moved, the hand and wrist
dragged a little. His lips were blue.

“You're not either,” he exhorted her. “Are
ya?”

She watched his mouth move and did not understand him.

“I'll tell ya a secret.” He leaned toward her, teeth
chattering, the hinge in his wrist ghastly. “Walter is sure as shit dead. I know
that much.”

“Who?”

“Walter. He's dead.”

“I don't know you,” she said.

“
Holee
, ” he cackled, “they dug me out from
under I don't know how much. I was half out of the tent, and all tangled up in it,
with this tree trunk laid acrost me. I was calling for fuckin' ages. And when they
started pulling me out I felt something soft under me. I said, ‘Hey, fellas, I
think there's someone else down there.'” The boy started hooting.
“It was Walter!” He laughed so hard his nose began to run. But when he
looked down at his swollen and flaccid fingers, the laughing subsided.

A spray of small stones exploded in a fan off the thing they sheltered
behind. After an interval they both winced and ducked away, comically slow, two injured
people in slow motion.

They sat listening to the crack and hiss of falling rock. And then the boy
lost consciousness. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then his head lolled and he
slumped back against the rock. The widow rose and stood over him, looking. The damaged
arm with its extra joint lay dangling, the flesh bent like a sausage. This curiosity
held her for a moment. And then she headed downhill again, still searching. Intent as
she was, she didn't notice the broken birds rising from the ground at her feet,
popping like fleas over the shattered rocks.

What used to be a river was now a shallow lake, swelling upward along the
fissures and runnels that wandered up the mountainside. Water spread wide and flat and
muddy along the valley bottom. Dust suffused the atmosphere, erasing the far side of the
valley, the flooded river endless now, a sea extending into cloud. Dust rained on the
congested cedars, drifted over the empty railway tracks, and swirled about with the
antic movements of several figures down by the
water. A maddened
horse dashed insanely up and down the new shoreline while bloodied, injured men tried in
vain to catch it. The men had kerchiefs to their faces against the dust and the animal
bellowed and coughed.

One of them, a big Swede, had a rope and was in the process of fashioning
a lasso when the widow emerged over a hump of rubble. He strode out toward the lapping
waterline to face down the galloping black yearling, palming the rope low, the slack
gathered into loops in his other hand. He had tied the far end to a tree.

“No, no!” another man hurried toward him. “You'll
break the bastard's neck!”

The yearling charged, then balked and dashed around them, its tail wild
and high, darting into the water in a rooster tail of spray. It ran and bucked wildly,
frightened into madness, then slipped and sank hindwise into the river, the unstable
scree beneath its hooves giving way. A few more futile lurches and the horse slid in up
to its neck. It began paddling away from the shoreline, confused, circling back, and
then suddenly, without warning, disappeared altogether, as if yanked downward. The men
ran forward to stand at the edge of the opaque river, its water the colour of milky
tea.

“Shit!” said the Swede. There was silence after the suck of
its going, then, horribly, a quiet churning from somewhere below. Bubbles rose in a
curved line.

Then the animal rocketed upward, gasping and coughing, now turning
instinctively to shore, eyes huge and rolling. It saw the men there, lasso dangling from
the Swede's hand. Hooves pounded the surface in twin explosions, as if the
yearling was galloping, and it pawed at the sludgy shoreline, long black legs finding
purchase only to lose it, the body
surging upward with great deep
groans only to drop away again.

“Shit,” said the Swede again, “he will drown,” and
indeed it did seem inevitable. Too late, the men backed away from the shoreline, but the
animal swam in ever-weakening circles, afraid now of the shore, of the invisible and
slithering thing beneath. Soon only the head swam along, and the huge round nostrils
blew a beige mist along the surface. In the wan morning light, the surface of the water
was glassy, motionless but for the turbulence of this foolish young horse. Finally, the
animal found a more manageable slope. Streaming and glossy as a newborn, it humped and
dragged its sorry way back onto dry land, then circled dully to face its pursuers,
coughing like a bellows, its legs buckling. It fixed the two men with a look of sullen
defeat.

“I go get him now,” said the Swede, but it was a question.

“Fuck it,” said a scrawny man. “Leave him be.”
They stood side by side, the lasso forgotten.

The widow sat and attended to her shredded feet, which didn't hurt
too badly and had for the most part stopped bleeding. She turned her head uphill and saw
curtains of dust hanging motionless over the landslide. Slowly, a veiled anxiety had
begun to grow in her. Familiar. Like hunger. The emergency had begun to dawn on her, and
the Reverend was at its heart. She stood up and turned back uphill.

MCECHERN'S STORE HAD
collapsed. The tent's
centre pole had snapped halfway up and the jagged stump jutted sword-like through the
heavy white canvas, beneath which the outlines of piles of goods could be discerned. The
topography of the establishment was now implied in humps and
sags,
like sleepers under a blanket. The widow arrived to find the place crowded with miners
— in this town filled with men, she had never seen so many at one time. Some had
been bandaged with torn shirts and handkerchiefs, and they sat quietly on the
store's raised platform. A few were moaning and writhing. All along one side, a
number of bodies had been laid out in a row along the planks, each pair of boots in a
slack V. The widow approached and leaned half-swooning against a tree, the thrum of
birdwings above her, her eyes in unwilling study on these many boots. Toes risen up, a
palisade against life, and beyond them, the faces of the dead. Among them was a pair of
bare feet, the hooked toes intimately white and still. Farther away, dragged under the
canopy of a spreading cedar so that he was almost invisible, lay another man, or what
was left of him. One foot and calf was missing entirely, his crushed upper body merely
reminiscent of a human shape, the knot of exploded viscera bluish and soupy. A wide
smear ran along the planks where he had been dragged, and this alone announced the
man's hiding place. The widow gaped, the sight so unreal that her mind could give
it no meaning. After a moment, she simply turned and wandered away.

The dwarf was standing with another man, the two of them worrying over a
third who seemed desperate to lie down and sleep. Several onlookers stood about,
offering suggestions: Stand him up. Lie him down. Give him whisky. Give him salt. The
man in question was the Norseman, now entirely red. His face was slashed in a dozen
places, his neck and chest were streaming blood, his shirt was torn and deeply
punctured, and blood had soaked the waistband of his pants. McEchern and the other
man's hands and shirts
were scarlet from handling him.
Together they sat him upright and shook him to force his attention, and McEchern was
plying him with water, which the drooping miner treated like poison. His trembling hand,
sticky with blood, kept coming up to push the metal cup away. But when they managed to
get the cup to his lips, he drank.

The environs of the store had become an impromptu hospital. Men rushed by
with steaming buckets of hot water, with shovels and rope. They moved the injured along
on stretchers made of blankets, fallen branches strapped together with rope, blasted
sections of walls from fallen houses. Debris lay everywhere and they scavenged through
it for what they needed. A crushed pair of boots had laces that could be used as a
tourniquet. Wind-blown clothes could keep the injured warm. Among this industry there
were dazed men, some of whom wandered anxiously and aimlessly while others simply
waited, talking under their breath, or not talking, rolling cigarettes with cold and
palsied fingers.

“Where is he?” she said to herself, fretful as a child,
scouting among these strangers. At the sound of her voice, McEchern looked up, and his
face wowed.

“C'mere, honey,” he called as sweetly as if she were a
tame bird. His fingers beckoned. “Come on now. I told you not to
wander.”

The widow remained where she was, her eyes on the fainting red man.
Suddenly she was streaming with tears.

“You!” The dwarf thwacked his companion on the shoulder and
pointed. “Go get her.”

The big man settled the widow on an upturned tin bathtub to inspect her
wounds, and there she sat, unable to stop
sobbing, the tears
running down her face and neck and into the shredded collar of her widow's
costume.

“Look at this knot,” he said with some admiration. He shuffled
from side to side, probing with his thumbs at a massive swelling behind her ear. At some
point, blood had flowed lavishly, hidden by her hair, but now it had stanched and
coagulated, and where his finger pressed it was sticky and hot and almost numb. The
widow suffered these ministrations the way a child suffers a washing. She could see the
Norseman had finally been left alone to sleep, lying on the wooden planks with his legs
dangling. She saw the swell of his chest, the torn knees of his pants, his legs hanging
down in their loose boots, one leg bouncing very slightly with the pulse of his heart,
slowly, like a contented man, keeping time with the music in his head.

Vaguely, the widow became aware of a grinding next to her skull. The big
man was working something out of the wound. She reached up to touch it and her hand was
slapped away. Then a sharp pain, and the man said, “Hello.”

His grimy face appeared before her, exultant, holding between thumb and
forefinger a small thing the size and shape of a tooth. A shard of granite perhaps. He
flicked it away, patted her cheek and said, “You got your bell rung all
right.” She scowled at him, and probed the wound with her fingers,
proprietorially. She felt the renewed warm tickle of blood crawling down her shoulder
blade and into the small of her back.

McEchern's condensed shape could been seen searching around under
the tent's heavy canvas, roaming from lump to lump, keeping up a consternated and
muffled discourse with
himself. She listened intently, following
his voice as it floated among the other men's voices and shouts and moans,
tracking him the way one tracks movement in the underbrush or a chirruping among blowing
trees and high wind. There was something in McEchern's voice that calmed her, and
she, too, stepped into the vestibule, where suddenly everything seemed very quiet and
there was only movement. She was at the verge of consciousness, waiting.

The big man was gone and she was alone. She looked about her for a
familiar face, but the men were all camouflaged with dust, with blood, and something
else, a distortion common to those in a disaster, a huge-eyed infantility brought on by
surprise. On a few of the faces was something approaching exhilaration, gratitude,
pride. How glad we are not to be dead. How clever to avoid it.

The poor red Norseman lay like a reveller in one of McEchern's
drunken soirees. He was unearthly still. His foot had ceased bobbing. Beneath him, urine
dripped between the planks into the shadows under the store.

She remembered it now. The noise so percussive and sharp she had felt it
in her chest, like the nearby discharge of a cannon. An impact that came from no
particular place, but out of the very air. Still silly from sleep, she had leaped from
the bed and was dressing in the dark. Moonlight came through the window and she could
see everything with perfect clarity. An unearthly rumbling everywhere, and the floor on
which she hopped and struggled into her clothes was shimmying madly. She saw the
Reverend groggy on his pallet, propped up on one elbow, his hair in a scruff on his
head. His face silvery in the darkness, the glint of his eye. The look on his face was
fear — he knew what was happening. He was
speaking, but she
couldn't hear the words. Something huge and white flashed by on a thunderous
trajectory, puncturing the air and blowing her hair about her face, sucking the breath
momentarily out of her lungs. The boulder blew past almost unseen, a curious flare amid
the roaring dark.