Drifting Off the Coast of New Mexico Read online

  Tom looks angry and looks away. We both know I’d head down a river in two seconds — hell, it was my idear to make for the Rio Grande in the first place, so’s we could reach El Paso. No, the bigger thing settin’ between me and Tom is, we both know it’s Tom who’s changed.

  Now Tom waves a dusty boot at Bierce, to get off the subject. “He got rounds?”

  I shake my head. “No rounds, no gun, not so much as a pen knife. Got him a pen, though. And a journal and a couple dollars. Reckon he meant to win his revolution with hifalutin’ talk.”

  “Well, he could do it if anyone could.”

  “That’s a true thing.” I watch Bierce till I see his chest rise and fall. It takes an uncomfortable long time. “But he’s a dark one, Tom. Head fulla strange idears.” And because it’s on my mind I add, “He makes what you turned into look like your cousin Mary.”

  Now he’s all dandered, because he don’t even argue, he just turns away. “Shame about them rounds,” he mutters. He pats his hip. “I’m down to one loaded and one halfway. You?”

  “What’s left in the Springfield. She holds five and I fired two. Pistol’s loaded.”

  Tom snorts at that, and for once I can’t say’s I blame him: I’m carrying me a pitiful little Smith & Wesson seven-shooter, which carries a ball like a homeopathic pill.

  He draws a finger through the dirt by his knee. “Don’t like doin’ that kinda ’rithmetic.”

  I spit. “Nope.”

  He glances at Bierce again, looking thoughtful. “His journal tell you anything?”

  “Ain’t read it.”

  “Well, maybe we should.”

  “His bi’ness.”

  “His business! Huck, the man got our fat into this fire an’ now he’s leavin’ us to cook. Is it asking too much to know more about him than his blasted name?”

  “You want to read it, go on.”

  “I’ll just do that thing.” And he goes on over to Bierce and only hesitates a touch before bending to him. Bierce mumbles something as Tom pulls the journal from his inner-coat pocket.

  “What’s he say?”

  Tom shakes his head. “Sounded like ‘Mary.’”

  I spit out the last of my chaw and watch Bierce twitching and muttering like a man in some kind of fever dream while Tom thumbs through the journal. “Well?” I say.

  “That’s a deep subject,” Tom says out of habit. He turns some pages. “It’s some kinda wrote-out dictionary, looks like. Here, listen at this: ‘age: that period in which we compound for the vices we still cherish by reviling those that we no longer have the enterprise to commit.’”

  “Now what’s that mean in English?” I ask.

  Tom shakes his head. “Nothing else in here but more of the same.” He looks disgusted. “Shoulda knowed he was a writer. It’s more a what seems familiar about him.”

  “Close fella,” I says.

  Tom closes the book. He looks up at the slope of our rock, sniffing the air and tense as a hound. “How long you think before they catch up?” he asks.

  Right then a pocket of granite blows off above Tom’s head. Dust kicks up, flakes sting my cheeks — and then I hear the shot.

  “Not long, I reckon,” I says.

  Tom ducks and says “Shit” a whole bunch of times. I fish out my shooting glasses from my duster and unfold the stems and put them on. Tom’s got a fist against his chest. “Shit,” he says again. “My heart just ain’t made for this no more.”

  Another patch of rock lights out for parts unknown. I pick up the Springfield. It’s still heavy, but nothing near what it was when we was running uphill and dragging that travois. “You want a lend a hand, there, Thomas?” I says.

  Tom nods and draws his right-hand gun. I pretend not to notice how his hand’s shaking. “Whyn’t you take Mr. Bierce’s hat, there,” I says, “seein’ as how he ain’t got much use for it right now, and push it head-high from the edge of this here rock.”

  “Hell, that trick’s older than dirt,” says Tom.

  “So’m I,” I says, not looking at him but working the bolt on the .30-06 Springfield. The spent cartridge hops out like a freed junebug. “An’ I didn’t get this way by usin’ inferior tricks. Them boys got enough ammunition that they’ll shoot at that hat just for the fun of it.”

  Tom stoops to retrieve Bierce’s short-brimmed black hat and straightens with a grunt and a hand on his lower back. He sets Bierce’s hat on the butt of his Colt. I’m already hunkered down prone, and now I poke the barrel of the Springfield just past the base of the boulder. “Hold on,” I says, and shove my glasses along my nose with a finger. “All right, hoss,” I says. “Do it to it.”

  Tom eases the hat on out. The crown scarce clears the edge when a plug tears out of it and whooshes above Tom’s own hat, followed by the flat crack of a Winchester. Tom snatches his hand back like it was burnt and commences to cussin’ a blue streak, but I’m holding my breath and sighting down the arroyo and don’t pay much attention. I see that little plume of smoke and follow it up a tad and just squeeze off calm as you please. The recoil hurts my shoulder something fierce, and I set my free hand on the ground and slide myself back and up to settin’ with my back to the boulder without waiting to follow my shot, ’cause I done kicked up a little plume of smoke my own self.

  We listen a spell.

  “Don’t hear a thing, Huck,” Tom says after a moment.

  “‘Spect not,” I agree while I’m rubbing my shoulder. “Feller don’t complain much with half his head blowed off.”

  Now it’s dusk. The cicadas are warming up for their season finale and the sky’s all Halloween orange and chimney red. I reckon ole Carranza’s Federales are full of piss and vinegar and just hankering for nightfall. Me and Tom’s upslope from them and bottlenecked by the canyon entrance this boulder’s the natural guard of, but there’s a whole lot more of them and they got a lot more guns and patience. Come dark they’re gonna be on us like ugly on an ape.

  Bierce is bad off.

  “‘Childhood,’ Tom reads. “‘The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth — two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.’” He closes the journal and looks annoyed.

  “That’s a mite rich for my plate,” I say.

  “Palate,” says Tom, looking annoyed. He sets the journal down and allows as how he’s powerful thirsty, so I give him the last of my plug. “It helps, a bit,” I tell him.

  He shoves the chaw in his mouth and commences to chewing. “Hell, I ain’t chawed since we was kids,” he says.

  “Never too late to take ’er up again,” I say.

  He gives another a them bitter laughs sounds more like something’s caught up his nose. He leans back against the rock and chews and gets a faraway look in his eyes, and I know he’s thinking about St. Petersburg. The damn fool had insisted we visit the cemetery so’s he could pay his respects to his Aunt Polly, and it was there we found his old sweetheart’s grave as well, only her tombstone read “Temple” and not “Thatcher.” But Tom knowed who it was right enough, and it just horsewhipped him. I mean it broke him complete, not just that she died, but that she’d had her own good long life without him and been a “beloved wife and mother,” if that epitaph weren’t just words. I had to help him out of there and ride him through a two-week drunk. To me it ain’t no good looking at all them bygone things. Hell, if I carried all that around with me all the time I plumb couldn’t walk. But Tom, he didn’t let go easy, and he had him a whole freight train he lugged along behind him.

  I have to admit that chaw may have been a mistake; it tends to cause a recollectiveness in a fella. “Coming on dark,” I say, to take his mind off those things.

  He don’t answer for a second. Then he shrugs and says, “Can’t stop the world turning.”

  Now we’re both thinking ’bout being so old.

  I don’t realize I’m dug deep into my own recollectiveness till I hear Tom’s voice like it’s
a long ways off. “Huck? You ever feel like…I don’t know. Like you wasn’t real?”

  “Hell, boss, right now I feel so real I could use a little watering-down.” But I look over at him and I see that he means it, and since it’s been a good long while since Tom’s talked to me about anything you could sink your teeth into, I tell him something I ain’t never told nobody.

  “There was this one day,” I say. “’Bout five years back. I’d done sold everything that tied me down and I was down and out in this sanitarium in Cincinnati on account a my lungs. It was right before I ran into you again at that aeroplane exhibition.”

  Bierce kicks fitfully and makes a groan that’s awful to hear because of how far down it sounds like it came from. He’s close by so I reach out and put a hand on his damp head. If I was in his shoes, I’d want to know someone was out here.

  “None of them quacks would out and say it,” I go on, strokin’ Bierce’s head, “but I reckon they thought I was in for the duration. Hell, I thought so too, then. That place had this big glassed-over sun room, and I’d took to spending my nights there on account a the comet. Some people was all afeared of that thing, going around talking nonsense about ‘last days’ and all. Me, I thought it was pretty. Looked to me like some kinda fish making its way upstream.”

  Tom nods. Everyone that’s got a memory remembers that comet.

  “Well, I was just looking at it and drowsing off on my cot, when I come on with this terrible feeling. At first I thought it was that sanitarium food gone bad and gonna kill me. Sure wouldna been no surprise; that was the worst food I ever had, and I’ve eat some pretty awful things in my time. But this weren’t like a food kind of sick; this was a deeper kind of thing. Like something inside was being tore out. I was dizzy and couldn’t see straight, and there was this one moment like you just said, where I just didn’t feel like a real person at all, and nothing I knowed or lived or seen was real either. I don’t mind saying it scared me something awful. I thought it was the comet, but nothing about it changed, and everything around me seemed the same. Then I thought, sweet Jesus, I done died and become a ha’nt. You get our age, that’s something you go to bed with most ever’ night.”

  Bierce’s head is hot in my hand, and I’m a little surprised to learn that I’m comforted by touching him as much as I want it to comfort him.

  “But I pinched myself,” I go on, “and I could feel the cot warm from my body heat and smell all that starch in them cheap sheets, so that weren’t it neither. Ain’t no ha’nt going to warm his cot. Never did find out what that feeling was, but I sure never forgot that night. Sent me on my way again, it did.”

  Tom’s nodding like he knows exactly what I mean. “April twenty-first, Nineteen and ten,” he says. “It’s branded in my skull. I felt like the whole world just went away from me like closing a door. Like — like who I was, was being took off from the rest of me like a shoe. All night long I sat awake in bed and thought about this gypsy woman who read my fortune sometime in my thirties. She looked like a dried-up apple and had hands like bird claws, I remember, and she read my palm an’ told me my fate weren’t in my hands.”

  “You can sure take that a number a ways,” I say.

  “I think she meant ever’ damn one of them.” Tom tosses a pebble he’s been toying with, then chases it down with a spit of tobacco juice. He misses by a country mile; ol’ Tom spits like his aunt Polly must have taught him how. Probably harder with all your teeth though. “Something made me cut loose after all that,” Tom goes on. “Something urging me on. Sold my press, my house and books. My wife was long passed away and we never had kids. Wasn’t much connecting me to anything. Kind of startling how easy it was to cast off and drift away from that life.”

  “Well, come to think of it, it woulda been ’round about late April,” I says. “I remember it was rainy season, anyhow. And after that night I couldn’t stay another minute. Had to sneak out from that sanitarium like I was twelve years old and at the Widow Douglas’,” I says. “I headed southwest. I remember nights camping out on the plain when I got to feeling like I’m the only thing that is real.”

  Tom thinks about this. “It’s kindly the same thing, ain’t it?”

  “All I know is that if it gets any more real, I’m gonna—”

  I stop cold just as Tom puts his hand up. It had sounded like a boot scraping on a rock. Tom points upward and I nod and we both get down to it.

  Them jackasses are coming over the top of the rock to get the drop on us, which seems a mite sensible till you figure that it’s nigh on dark, and they’s outlined against the sky like shoot-em-up cut-outs, and we’re deep enough in shadow that there could be thirty of us drinking tequila and having a party with dancing girls and a mariachi band before they’d be able to tell.

  Tom digs for his cannon and I grab up the Springfield and stand over Bierce. I know I ain’t fed a round in the chamber ’cause that’s a sure way to shoot your own damn foot off, so I have to stand there knowing I got to work the bolt before it’s any use. That pea-shooter S & W on my hip is pretty much a piece of last resort.

  The first bear to come over the mountain, we set back and let him take his time and feel his way and stick his head out and take a good long gander before Tom leans out and blows his fool head off. Son of a bitch don’t even have the courtesy to die in a helpful manner: he just lets out a yip like a puppy and flops back on the rock and stays there, depriving us of the use of a perfectly good pistol, even if it is of Mexican manufacture. His two hermanos are behind him, from all the ijo putas we hear, and they fire off a lot of bullets I sorely would like, for I would expend them in a much more economical manner. But there’s a pretty-near vertical drop for them to deal with and they can’t draw down on us before we start pickin’ away. Tom has to waste another round to keep ’em from getting too curious up there, and here we are and I guess that’s why they call it a Mexican standoff.

  So I just sit here in the shadowy dark feeling my lungs afire and my heart freight-training along on a downhill grade, and Bierce is wheezing below me and Tom’s rubbing his arthritic wrist, and me and him are just looking at each other like, well, what now?

  I jerk my head to indicate behind me and Tom nods. Since they got us pinned against this rock, their amigos are probably working their way up the arroyo to flank us. All of a sudden we got a pretty narrow range of movement. But they can’t get a bead on us without being wide open.

  I turn my back on Tom and cradle the Springfield. Bierce gives a dry cough beneath me and for a mean second I want to gag him to shut him up. But in a way it’s Bierce’s cough that saves me.

  Since he’s already giving us away I go ahead and work the action on the Springfield, so that when the Federale in the dark jacket rounds the rock with his hogleg lining up on my chest, I fire blind and he jerks backward with his feet leaving the ground like he’s been yanked by an invisible rope. My arm don’t want to cooperate when I work the bolt, and the spent cartridge lands hot on my forearm. One round left in the Springfield, and that Mexican’s relatives is probably right behind him wanting to discuss this lamentable situation.

  Above us comes a funny grinding sound. I don’t want to look up and it’s a good thing I don’t, ’cause sure enough old Dark Jacket’s brother-in-law comes cannonballing into sight already blazing, only I got him beat at this, too, ’cause he’s firing chest-high and I’m squatting in anticipation of this. Two holes get cut in the air above my head, and so help me the thing I see best about that Mexican is the white teeth in his shit-eating grin, so I put my last .30-06 round somewhere in their vicinity. Then I let the rifle go and I draw my overgrown pea-shooter, but no more relatives show up and I figure the rest are gonna be a little hesitant with two of ’em dead as yesterday on my front porch, so to speak. So when I hear that grinding again I chance a look up.

  Tom, he figures out what it is same time I do. “Rock!” he yells, just as I hear the damn thing come tumbling down at us. Tom jumps away from our boulder and I
sort of spring out after him. Ain’t no way I’m jumping t’other way ’cause that’s just a shooting gallery, and besides Tom’s gonna need some cover. Sure enough they start firing at Tom from on top of the boulder. I let off a shot their way just to keep ’em honest and they ease up some. Meantime that rock they’ve tumbled lands not a foot from Bierce’s head and rolls toward us a ways. It’s about a yard wide, and it fetches up against Tom, and hang me for a liar if that rock don’t take a round that woulda cooked Tom’s goose but good.

  Well, there’s just nowhere to go but back against our boulder. The box canyon’s too far a sprint, and I wasn’t particular good at outrunning bullets even as a youngster. And there’s Bierce. So I grab Tom and pull him back. He’s down on one knee and sighting up like this is some kinda Wild West show, and they could put an end to him even if they laid low and throwed rocks. But they’ve lost enough boys that I figure they’re already calling a lodge meeting to rethink the situation, so we make it back to our boulder with our skin intact.

  We set down on either side of Bierce, both of us breathing so loud I can’t hear nothing else. I glance over at them two Federales I shot. Both of ’em got pistols and bandoleros that look mighty appealing, but getting to ’em’s a good way to make myself look like a Swiss cheese. But it’s powerful frustrating and sorely tempting all the same.

  Tom’s gritting his teeth and looking mighty pained. “Y’all right?” I ask.

  “Got a stitch in my side,” he says in a tight voice.

  “Better’n needing stitches.” I look out at the two dead Mexicans. “You think of any way we can relieve them two boys of their pistols?” I ask. “I figure we can make better use of them than they can.”

  Tom winces as he leans out a little to see. “I’d have to be pretty desperate to try her,” he says.

  “Well, what the hell you call this?”

  He sets a hand low on his back and gives a little grunt. “Could put our belts together and try fishing for them,” he suggests. “We’re good Missouri boys.”