The Sisters Brothers

‘It doesn’t matter, now. Close your eyes.’

‘Hello?’ said the trapper. ‘Hello?’ He was looking at me but I do not think he could see me.

‘Close your eyes. It’s all right.’

‘I didn’t want to do this,’ he complained. ‘Jim thought he could lick you boys, and that he’d be able to tell everyone about it.’

‘You should close your eyes and rest,’ I said.

‘Ch. Ch, ch.’ Then the life hopped out of him and he died, and I returned to Tub, and the saddle. This ‘counting to three’ business was an old trick of ours. It was something we were neither ashamed nor proud of; suffice to say it was only employed in the direst situations, and it saved our lives more than once.

Charlie and I were set to leave when we heard a boot scrape in the loft above us. The hand had not left, but hidden away to witness the fight; sadly for him he had also witnessed our numbers trick, and we climbed the ladder to find him. This took some time as there were many tall towers of stacked hay bales in the loft, which made for excellent covering. ‘Come out, boy,’ I called. ‘We are all through here, and we promise not to hurt you.’ A pause, and we heard a scurrying in the far corner. I fired at the sound but the bales swallowed the bullet. Another pause, and more scurrying. Charlie said, ‘Boy, come out here. We’re going to kill you, and there is no chance for escape. Let’s be sensible about it.’

‘Boo-hoo-hoo,’ said the hand.

‘You are only wasting our time. And we have no more time to waste.’

‘Boo-hoo-hoo.’

Chapter 34

After we dispatched the hand we visited with Mayfield in his parlor. He was shocked when he found us knocking on his door, to the point that he could not speak or move for a time; I ushered him to his couch, where he sat awaiting his nameless fate. To Charlie I said, ‘He is different from last night.’

‘This is the true man,’ Charlie told me. ‘I knew it the moment I saw him.’ Addressing Mayfield, he said, ‘As you may have guessed, we have cut down your help, all four of them, plus the stable boy, which was unfortunate, and unplanned. I am quick to point out that this is entirely your doing, as we brought you the red pelt in good faith and had nothing to do with its disappearance. Thusly, the deaths of your men and the boy should rest on your conscience alone, not ours. I do not ask that you agree with this necessarily, only that you recognize I have said as much. Are we understood?’

Mayfield did not answer. His eyes were pinpointed to a spot on the wall behind me. I turned to see what he was staring at and discovered it to be: Nothing. When I looked back at him he was rubbing his face with his palms, as though he were washing.

‘All right,’ Charlie continued. ‘This next part you will not like, but here is the price to pay for the impositions you hefted upon my brother and myself. Are you listening to me, Mayfield? Yes, I want you to tell us, now. Where do you keep your safe?’

Mayfield was quiet for such a time I did not think he heard the question. Charlie was opening his mouth to repeat himself when Mayfield answered, in a voice scarcely above a whisper, ‘I will not tell you.’ Charlie walked over to him. ‘Tell me where the safe is or I will hit you on the head with my pistol.’ Mayfield said nothing and Charlie removed his gun from the holster, gripping it at the barrel. He paused, then clipped Mayfield on the very top of his skull with the walnut butt. Mayfield fell back onto the couch, covering his head and making restrained pain sounds, a kind of squealing through gritted teeth that I found most undignified. He began at once to bleed, and Charlie pressed a hanky into his fist as he sat the man up. Mayfield did not ball this into a bunch and hold it over his wound as anyone else might have, but laid the square of cotton flat over his head like a tablecloth; as he was bald on top, the blood fixed the hanky to his head quite handily. Whatever possessed him to do this? Was this a thoughtless inspiration, or something he had learned somewhere? Mayfield sat looking at us with a sulky expression on his face. He had only one boot on, and I noticed his bare foot was red and swollen at the toes. I pointed and said, ‘Touch of chilblains, Mayfield?’

‘What’s chilblains?’

‘It looks like that’s what’s wrong with your foot.’

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with it.’

‘I think it’s chilblains,’ I said.

Charlie snapped his fingers, both to quiet me and to regain Mayfield’s attention. ‘This time,’ he said, ‘if you do not answer me, I will hit you twice.’

‘I won’t let you have it all,’ Mayfield said.

‘Where is the safe?’

‘I worked for that money. It is not yours to take.’

‘Right.’ He hit Mayfield twice with the butt and the man once again doubled over on the couch to wail and complain. Charlie had not removed the hanky to strike him and the blows were unpleasantly wet sounding. When he propped Mayfield upright, the man was tensing his jaws and panting and his entire head was slick with blood—the hanky itself was dripping. He stuck out his lower lip and was attempting a show of bravery, but he looked ridiculous, like something in a butcher’s display, blood running down his chin and neck, soaking into his collar. Charlie said, ‘Let’s get something clear between us, now. Your money is gone. This is a simple truth, a point of fact, and if you struggle against it we will kill you, then we’ll find your safe. I want you to ponder this: Why should you receive abuse and death for something that is already forfeit? Think on it. There is no sense in your attitude.’

‘You are going to kill me one way or the other.’

‘That is not necessarily the truth,’ I said.

‘It isn’t,’ said Charlie.

‘Will you give me your word on it?’ asked Mayfield.

Charlie looked at me, his eyes asking: Should we let him live? My eyes answered him: I don’t care. He said, ‘If you give us the money, we will leave you as we found you, living and breathing.’

‘Swear on it.’

‘I swear on it,’ said Charlie.

Mayfield watched him, searching for some sign of devilishness. Satisfied, he looked over at me. ‘You swear it also?’

‘If my brother says it’s so, then it’s so. But if you want me to swear I won’t kill you, then I swear it.’

He removed the heavy hanky and flung it to the ground; it clapped as it hit the floor and he regarded it with a measure of disgust. Now he straightened his vest and stood, teetering on his heels, then sitting back down, having nearly fainted from the effort. ‘I need a drink, and something more to clean my head. I do not wish to walk through my hotel looking like this.’ I fixed him a tall brandy that he drank in two long swallows. Charlie ducked into the water closet and emerged with a handful of towels, a bowl of water, and a hand mirror. These were placed on the low table before Mayfield, and we watched as he set to work cleaning himself. He was unemotional as he did this, and I felt an obscure admiration for him. He was losing all of his savings and gold, and yet he displayed as much concern as a man shaving his face. I was curious what he was thinking about, and asked him; when he said he was making plans I inquired as to what they might be. He lay the mirror facedown on the table and said, ‘That depends entirely upon how much of my money you men will allow me to keep.’

‘Keep?’ said Charlie, eyebrows raised. He was rifling the drawers of Mayfield’s desk. ‘I thought it was understood you will keep none.’

Mayfield exhaled. ‘None at all? Do you mean to say, absolutely none?’

Charlie looked at me. ‘Was that not the plan?’

I said, ‘The plan, if I’m not mistaken, was to kill him. Now that we have changed that part, we can at least talk about this new concern. I will admit it seems cruel, to leave him penniless.’

Charlie’s eyes darkened, and he went into himself. Mayfield said, ‘You asked what I was thinking. Well, I will tell you. I was thinking that a man like myself, after suffering such a blow as you men have struck on this day, has two distinct paths he might travel in his life. He might walk out into the world with a wounded heart, intent on sharing his mad hatred with every person he passes; or, he might start out anew with an empty heart, and he should take care to fill it up with only proud things from then on, so as to nourish his desolate mind-set and cultivate something positive anew.’

‘Is he just inventing this as he goes?’ Charlie asked.

‘I am going to take the second route,’ Mayfield continued. ‘I am a man who needs to rebuild, and the first thing I will work on is my sense of purpose. I will remind myself of who I am, or was, for I fear my padded life here has made me lazy. I should say that your getting the better of me with such ease is proof of it.’

‘He describes his inaction and cowardice as laziness,’ Charlie said.

‘And with five men dead,’ I said, ‘he describes our overtaking his riches as easy.’

‘He has a describing problem,’ said Charlie.

Mayfield said, ‘My hope, I will put it to you men directly, is that you will see me through for trip expenses to your hometown of Oregon City, where I shall travel at once and lay waste to the mongrel with the scythe blade, James Robinson.’

He said this and immediately my brother and I had the same, evil thought.

‘Tell me that it’s not perfection,’ said Charlie.

‘But it is too tragic,’ I said.

‘You would protect this criminal acquaintance against what you have done to me?’ Mayfield said indignantly. ‘It is only just and proper that you men assist me in seeing this through. You have taken away all that I have earned, but you can redeem yourselves, at least partially, if you will only let me keep but a portion of my own fortune.’

This self-righteous speech sealed his fate, and we came to the agreement that Mayfield should be given one hundred dollars, just enough to get him to Oregon City, where he would be stuck, and where the first person he asked would inform him of Robinson’s death, and he would know we had known and would recall our amusement in bitter, black blood. The money was paid out in stamped gold taken directly from his safe, which was located in the basement of the hotel. Staring into its open mouth, Mayfield said, ‘That’s the only time I’ve ever been lucky in my life. Filled up a safe with gold and papers. More than most can say, at any rate.’ He nodded solemnly, but his show of bravado soon gave way to passionate emotion; his face dropped and tears began squirting from his eyes. ‘But goddamnit, luck is a hard feeling to hold on to!’ he said. Wiping his face, he cursed just as hotly and sincerely as he could, though quietly. ‘I feel no luck in my body now, and that is a fact.’ He cut a piteous silhouette with his little purse of money, pinching the strings the way one holds a dead mouse by its tail. We followed him outside and watched him tightening and refitting his clothing and saddlebags. He seemed to want to give a speech, but the words either did not come naturally or else he considered us unfit to receive them, and he remained silent. He mounted his horse, leaving with a curt nod and a look in his eyes that said: I do not like you people. We returned to the basement to count the safe’s contents, splitting and pocketing the paper money, which amounted to eighteen hundred dollars. The gold proved to be too much to account for in our travels and so was hidden underneath a potbellied stove, resting on a pallet of hardwood in the far basement corner. This was a dirty job, as we had to dismantle the tin chimney to move the stove back and forth, and we were both rained down in black soot; but when we were finished I could not imagine a soul would ever find our treasure, for no one would think to look in so remote a spot. The rough estimate of these riches was set at fifteen thousand dollars; my take of this more than tripled my savings, and as we left the musty basement, heading up the stairs and into the light, I felt two things at once: A gladness at this turn of fortune, but also an emptiness that I did not feel more glad; or rather, a fear that my gladness was forced or false. I thought, Perhaps a man is never meant to be truly happy. Perhaps there is no such a thing in our world, after all.

As we walked the halls of the hotel the whores were abuzz with the news of Mayfield’s head-wounded departure, and the disappearance of the trappers. I spied Charlie’s whore, looking only slightly less green than before, and took her to the side, asking where the bookkeeper was.

‘They ran her up to the doc’s.’

‘Is she all right?’

‘I imagine. They’re always running her up there.’

I pressed a hundred dollars into her hand. ‘I want you to give this to her when she comes back.’

She stared at the money. ‘Jesus Christ on a cloud.’

‘I will return in two weeks’ time. If I find she has not received it, there will be a price to pay, do you understand me?’

‘Mister, I was just standing in the hall, here.’

I held up a double eagle. ‘This is for you.’

She dropped the coin into her pocket. Peering down the hall in the direction Charlie had gone she asked, ‘I don’t suppose your brother’ll be leaving me a hundred.’

‘No, I don’t suppose he will.’

‘You got all the romantic blood, is that it?’

‘Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.’

I turned and walked away. A half-dozen steps, and she asked. ‘You want to tell me what she did for this?’

I stopped and thought. I told her, ‘She was pretty, and kind to me.’

And the poor whore’s face, she just did not know what to think about that. She went back into her room, slammed the door shut, and shrieked two times.

Chapter 35

We rode out of town and followed the shallows of the river. We were days late for our meeting with Morris but neither of us was much concerned about this. I was reliving and cataloging the events of the previous thirty-six hours when Charlie began to chuckle. Tub and I were in the lead; without turning I called out, asking him what was so amusing.

‘I was thinking of the day Father died.’

‘What about it?’

‘You and I were sitting in the field behind the house, eating our lunch when I heard he and Mother arguing. Do you remember what we were eating?’

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘We were eating apples. Mother had wrapped them in a strip of cloth and sent us outside. She had known they would argue, I believe.’

‘The cloth was faded red,’ I said.

‘That’s right. And the apples were green, and underripe. I remember you making a face about it, though you were so young I’m surprised you cared.’

‘I can remember the apples being sour.’ The vividness of the memory brought a pucker to my mouth, and saliva washed over my tongue.

Charlie said, ‘It was the hottest day of a bona fide heat wave, and we were sitting there in the long grass, eating and listening to Mother and Father’s screaming. Or I was listening to it. I don’t know if you noticed.’

As he told the story, though, it was as if the scenario was coming into view. ‘I think I noticed,’ I said. Then I was sure I had. ‘Did something break?’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You really do remember.’

‘Something broke, and she screamed.’ My throat began to swell, and I found myself holding back tears.

‘Father broke out the window with his fist and then hit her on the arm with an ax handle. He had gone crazy, I think. Before that he’d edged up next to craziness but when I entered the house to help Mother, I felt he had given over his whole being to it. He didn’t recognize me when I came in with my rifle.’

‘How is it that people go crazy?’

‘It’s just a thing that sometimes happens.’

‘Can you go truly crazy and then come back?’

‘Not truly crazy. No, I don’t think so.’

‘I’ve heard a father hands it down to the next.’

‘I have never thought of it. Why, do you ever feel crazy?’

‘Sometimes I feel a helplessness.’

‘I don’t think that is the same thing.’

‘Let’s hope.’

He said, ‘Do you remember the first rifle of mine? The gun that Father called my pea shooter? He made no jokes about it when I began pulling that trigger.’ Charlie paused. ‘I shot him twice, one in the arm and another in the chest, and the chest shot brought him down. And he lay there, spitting at me, over and over—spitting and cursing and hating me. I have never seen hatred like that, never before or since. Our father, lying there, coughing up thick blood and spitting it at me. Mother was knocked out. Her arm was badly broken, and the pain made her faint. That’s some kind of blessing, I guess, that she didn’t have to see her son kill her husband. Well, Father laid his head down and died, and I dragged him out of the house and into the stable and by the time I came back, Mother’d woken up and was in a trance of pain or fright. She kept saying, “Whose blood’s that? Whose blood’s that on the floor?” I told her it was mine. I didn’t know what else to say. I helped her up and out, walked her to the wagon. It was a long ride into town, with her screaming every time I hit a bump in the road. Her forearm was bent like a chevron. Like a shotgun opened for loading.’

‘What happened next?’ I asked, for this I could not recall.

‘By the time I got some medicine in her, got her splinted up, it was late afternoon. And it wasn’t until I was halfway back that I remembered about you at all.’ He coughed. ‘I hope that doesn’t make you feel hurt, brother.’

‘That does not hurt me.’

‘I had been distracted. And you were always off in your private world of thoughts, quiet in the corners. But as I said, it was powerfully hot that day. And of course just as soon as I left you, you pulled your bonnet off. And there you sat, for four or five hours, with your fair hair and skin. Mother was sleeping in the wagon, drugged, and I left her there to rush out and see about you. I had not thought of you getting burned—my concern was that a coyote might have come along and picked you apart, or that you had walked down to the river and drowned. So I was very relieved to see you sitting there in one piece, and I ran down the hill to collect you. And you were just as red and burned as could be. The whites of your eyes turned red as blood. You were blind for two weeks and your skin peeled away in swaths like the skin of an onion. And that, Eli, is how you got your freckles.’

Part Three

HERMANN

KERMIT

WARM

Chapter 36

The harbor, at first sight, I did not understand it. There were so many ships at anchor that their masts looked to be tangled impossibly; hundreds of them packed together so densely as to give the appearance of a vast, limbless forest rolling on the tides. Charlie and I threaded our way up the shoreline, and all around us was chaos: Men of every race and age rushing, shouting, pushing, fighting; cows and sheep were directed this way and that; horse-led wagons carried lumber and bricks up the mud-slick hill, and the sound of hammering and building echoed from the city out to sea. There was laughter in the air, though it did not give me the impression of gaiety, but something more maniacal and evil wishing. Tub was nervous, and so was I. I had not seen anything remotely like it and I wondered how we might possibly find one man in these labyrinthine streets and alleyways, where all was queer and dark and hidden.

‘Let us search out Morris,’ I said.

‘He has already waited weeks for us,’ said Charlie. ‘Another hour won’t change anything.’ Of course my brother liked the atmosphere, and was not the least bit uneasy.

I saw that many of the ships seemed to have been at anchor a long while, despite their still being loaded down with cargo, and I asked a man walking past about this. He was barefoot and held a chicken under his arm, which throughout our conversation he stroked lovingly on the head.

‘Abandoned by their crews,’ he told us. ‘When the fever to dig is upon you, there is not a second to spare. Certainly one cannot be expected to unload crates of flour for a dollar a day with the rivers singing their song so nearby.’ Blinking at the horizon, he said, ‘I often look out at these boats and imagine their baffled investors, impotently raging in New York and Boston, and this pleases me. Can I ask, are you men just arriving in San Francisco? How are you finding it?’

‘I can only say I am eager to know it better,’ said Charlie.

The man said, ‘My feelings about San Francisco rise and fall with my moods. Or is it that the town alters my moods, thus informing my opinions? Either way, one day it is my true friend, a few days after, my bitterest enemy.’

‘What is your feeling this morning?’ I asked.

‘I am halfway between, just now. Altogether I am doing decently, thank you.’

Charlie said, ‘How is it that these vessels have not been looted?’

‘Oh, many have been. The ones that remain untouched are either guarded by their stubborn captains or else are filled with nonvaluable cargo. No one has any concerns for free wheat or cotton, just now. Or should I say, almost no one.’ He pointed to a lone man rowing a small boat in the bay, making his way between the tall ships. His skiff was ridiculously loaded down, and he dipped his oars with great caution so as to avoid tipping. ‘That there is a fellow called Smith. I know him well enough. What will he do when he gets to shore? He will strap those heavy boxes to his sickly mule’s neck and drag them up to Miller’s General Store. Miller will skin Smith on the price and the money Smith receives for his backbreaking work will be lost in a single round of cards, or it will scarcely buy him a meal. I wonder if you two have had the pleasure of dining in our fair city? But no, I would know if you had, for your faces would be bloodless, and you would be muttering ceaseless insults to God in heaven.’

Charlie said, ‘I paid twenty-five dollars for a whore in Mayfield.’

The man said, ‘You will pay that same amount to simply sit at the bar with them in San Francisco. To lie down with one, expect to put up a minimum of a hundred dollars.’

‘What man would pay that?’ I asked.

‘They are lining up to pay it. The whores are working fifteen-hour shifts and are said to make thousands of dollars per day. You must understand, gentlemen, that the tradition of thrift and sensible spending has vanished here. It simply does not exist anymore. For example, when I arrived this last time from working my claim I had a sizable sack of gold dust, and though I knew it was lunacy I decided to sit down and have a large dinner in the most expensive restaurant I could find. I had been living on the cold ground for three straight months, surviving on trout and pork fat and more trout. My spine was twisted from labor and I was utterly desperate for some type of warmth and pomp, a touch of velvet, and damn the cost. So it was that I ate a decent-sized, not particularly tasty meal of meat and spuds and ale and ice cream, and for this repast, which would have put me back perhaps half a dollar in my hometown, I paid the sum of thirty dollars in cash.’

Charlie was disgusted. ‘Only a moron would pay that.’

‘I agree,’ said the man. ‘One hundred percent I agree. And I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively. Furthermore, I hope that your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.’

Down the beach a half mile I noticed an enormous pulley system made of tall timbers and thick rope set back from the waterline; this was being used to run a steam-sailer ship aground. A man in a broad-brimmed black hat and tailored black suit was whipping a team of horses to turn the winch. I asked the chicken man about the purpose of this operation and he said, ‘Here is someone with the same ambition as Smith, but with brains as well. That man in the hat has claimed the abandoned boat as his own, and is having it dragged to a sliver of land he had the foresight to buy some time ago. He will shore the boat upright and lease out its quarters to boarders or shopkeepers and make himself a speedy fortune. A lesson for you men: Perhaps the money is not to be made in the rivers themselves, but from the men working them. There are too many variables in removing gold from the earth. You need courage, and luck, and the work ethic of a pack mule. Why bother, with so many others already at it, piling into town one on top of the other and in a great hurry to spend every last granule?’

‘Why do you not open a shop yourself?’ I asked.

The question surprised him, and he took a moment to consider what the answer might be. When it came to him, a sadness appeared in his eyes and he shook his head. ‘I’m afraid my role in all this is settled,’ he said.

I was going to ask which role he was referring to when I heard a noise on the wind, a muffled crunching or cracking in the distance, followed by a whistling sound cutting through the thick ocean air. One of the pulley ropes had snapped, and I saw the man in the black suit standing over a horse lying on its side in the sand. That he was not whipping the horse informed me it was dying or dead.

‘It is a wild time here, is it not?’ I said to the man.

‘It is wild. I fear it has ruined my character. It has certainly ruined the characters of others.’ He nodded, as though answering himself. ‘Yes, it has ruined me.’

‘How are you ruined?’ I asked.

‘How am I not?’ he wondered.

‘Couldn’t you return to your home to start over?’

He shook his head. ‘Yesterday I saw a man leap from the roof of the Orient Hotel, laughing all the way to the ground, upon which he fairly exploded. He was drunk they say, but I had seen him sober shortly before this. There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envenom your very center. It is a madness of possibilities. That leaping man’s final act was the embodiment of the collective mind of San Francisco. I understood it completely. I had a strong desire to applaud, if you want to know the truth.’

‘I don’t understand the purpose of this story,’ I said.

‘I could leave here and return to my hometown, but I would not return as the person I was when I left,’ he explained. ‘I would not recognize anyone. And no one would recognize me.’ Turning to watch the town, he petted his fowl and chuckled. A single pistol shot was heard in the distance; hoofbeats; a woman’s scream, which turned to cackling laughter. ‘A great, greedy heart!’ he said, and then walked toward it, disappearing into it. Down the beach, the man with the whip stood away from the dead horse, staring out at the bay and the numberless masts. He had removed his hat. He was unsure, and I did not envy him.

Chapter 37

We knocked on Morris’s door at the hotel but he did not answer. Charlie picked the lock and we entered, finding his many toilet items, his perfumes and waxes, stacked on the floor next to the entrance. But besides this there was no sign of the man, no clothing or baggage, and the bed was made, the windows all shut tight; I had the feeling Morris had been away several days. His absence struck Charlie and I as conspicuous bordering on unnerving, for while it was true we were tardy in arriving, Morris’s instruction was to wait for us no matter the length of time, and it was out of character for him to stray from any prearrangement. When I suggested we might check to see if he had left word for us with the hotel proprietors, Charlie encouraged me to investigate. I was stepping toward the door when I noticed a large black horn emerging from the wall beside the bed. Hanging within was a polished brass bell. Below the horn there hung a sign that read: RING BELL TONGUE. SPEAK FOR SERVICE. I followed the instruction and the bell tone filled the room. This startled Charlie; he craned his neck to watch. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I have heard of this system in eastern hotels.’

‘Heard of what system?’

‘Just wait.’ A moment passed and a woman’s voice, shrunken and distant, emanated from the stomach of the building.

‘Hello? Mr. Morris?’

Charlie turned all the way around. ‘She is in the wall? Where is it coming from?’

‘Hello?’ the voice repeated. ‘Did you ring for service?’

‘Say something,’ Charlie told me. But I felt inexplicably bashful, and motioned for him to speak. He called over, ‘Can you hear me in there?’

‘I can hear you faintly. Please speak into the horn directly.’

Charlie was enjoying this, and he stood up from the bed and approached the device, putting his face fully into the horn. ‘How is that? Better?’

‘That’s better,’ said the voice. ‘What can I do for you today, Mr. Morris? I am relieved to have you back. We were worried when you went away with that strange little bearded man.’ Charlie and I shared a look at this. Readdressing the horn, he said, ‘This is not Morris, ma’am. I have come from the Oregon Territory to visit with him. He and I are employed by the same firm there.’

The voice paused. ‘And where is Mr. Morris?’

‘That I do not know.’

‘We only just arrived,’ I said, impelled to take part.

‘Who was that?’ said the voice.

‘That is my brother,’ said Charlie.

‘So there are two of you, now.’

‘There was always two of us,’ I told her. ‘Since the day I was born there was.’ Neither Charlie nor the woman recognized my joke, and it was in fact as though it had never existed. The voice adopted a peevish tone: ‘Who gave you men permission to enter Mr. Morris’s room?’

‘The door was unlocked,’ Charlie lied.

‘So what if it was? You cannot simply enter another man’s rented quarters and speak into his wall piece.’

‘You have our apologies for that, ma’am. We were to rendezvous here some days ago, only our travels were delayed. As such, we were in a hurry to visit with Morris, and threw caution to the wind.’

‘He made no mention of any rendezvous.’

‘He wouldn’t have.’

‘Hmm,’ said the voice.

Charlie continued: ‘You say he has left with a bearded man. Was this person called Warm? Hermann Warm?’

‘I never asked the man’s name, and he never offered to share it with me.’

‘What color was his beard?’ I asked.

‘Is that the brother again?’

‘Was it a red beard?’ I asked.

‘It was red.’

‘How long has Morris been away?’ said Charlie.

‘Four days today. He paid up until tomorrow morning. When he said he was leaving early I offered him a partial refund but he would not take it. A gentleman, that one.’

‘And he left no word for us?’

‘He did not.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘To the Illuminated River, he told me. He and the red-bearded man had a laugh about it. I do not know why.’

‘You are saying they were laughing together?’

‘They were laughing at the same time. I assumed they were laughing at the same thing. I searched for the river on a map but couldn’t find it.’

‘And Mr. Morris did not appear to be under duress? As though his departure was forced, for example?’

‘It did not seem so.’

Charlie studied this. He said, ‘The friendship is a curiosity to me.’

‘To me, also,’ the voice agreed. ‘I’d thought Mr. Morris didn’t like the man, then all at once they became inseparable, spending every minute together locked away in that room.’

‘And you are certain he left no instruction for us?’

‘I think I would know if he had,’ she answered haughtily.

‘He left nothing behind at all then?’

‘I did not say that.’

Charlie glared into the horn. ‘Ma’am, tell me what he left, if you please.’

I could hear the woman breathing. ‘A book,’ she said finally.

‘What kind of book?’

‘A book he wrote in.’

‘What did he write in the book?’

‘I don’t know. And if I did know, I would not tell you.’

‘Personal writing, is that it?’

‘That’s right. Naturally, just as soon as I understood what it was I closed it up.’

‘What did you learn from your reading?’

‘That the weather was not favorable at the start of his trip to San Francisco. I am embarrassed to have learned that much. I respect the privacy of my lodgers.’

‘Yes.’

‘My lodgers can expect from me the most absolute kind of privacy.’

‘I understand. Can I ask you, where is the book now?’

‘It is with me, in my room.’

‘I would like very much if you would show it to us.’

She paused. ‘That I should not do, I don’t think.’

‘I tell you we are his friends.’

‘Then why did he not leave word for you?’

‘Perhaps he left the book for us.’

‘He forgot the book. I found it tangled in sheets at the foot of his bed. No, he was in a rush to pack and go, always looking over his shoulder. For all I know it was you two he wished to stay ahead of.’

‘You will not show me the book then, is that correct?’

‘I will do right by my guests, is what I will do.’

‘Very well,’ Charlie said. ‘Will you bring us up lunch with ale?’

‘You are staying on with us?’

‘For one night, anyway. This room will do fine.’

‘What if Mr. Morris comes back?’

‘If he left with Warm, as you say, he will not be coming back.’

‘But if he does?’

‘Then you will make a nice profit in champagne, for it will be a happy reunion indeed.’

‘Do you want a hot lunch or cold?’

‘Hot lunch, with ale.’

‘Two full hot lunches?’

‘With ale.’

The woman signed off, and Charlie returned to lie on the bed. I asked him what he made of the situation and he said, ‘I don’t know what to make of it. We will need to get a look at the book, of course.’

‘I don’t believe the woman will share it.’

‘We will see about that,’ he said.

I opened a window and leaned out into the salty air. The hotel was located on a steep incline and I watched a group of Chinese men, in their braids and silk and muddy slippers, pushing an ox up the hill. The ox did not want to go, and they slapped its backside with their hands. Their language was something like a chorus of birds, completely alien and strange, but beautiful for its strangeness. Likely they were only cursing. There came a knock at the door and the stout, lipless hotel woman entered with our lunches, which were tepid, if not actually hot. The ale was cool and delicious and I drank half of it in a single pass. I asked the woman what I had spent with this long sip and she scrutinized the glass. ‘Three dollars,’ she estimated. ‘Both meals together are seventeen.’ It seemed she hoped to be paid at once, and Charlie stood and handed her a double eagle; when she began fishing the change from her pocket, he caught her wrist, telling her to keep it as payment for our rudeness in entering Morris’s room without permission. She kept the money but did not thank him and in fact appeared displeased to be receiving it. When Charlie produced a second double eagle and held this in her direction, her face grew hard.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘For the book.’

‘I have already told you, you cannot have it.’

‘Of course, ma’am, you would keep it; we only wish to look it over awhile.’

‘You will never lay eyes upon it,’ she said. Her hands were red and balled and she was thoroughly insulted. She stomped from the room, in a hurry I suspected to tell some or all of her employees of this latest moral victory, and Charlie and I sat together to eat our lunch. I became sorrowful at the thought of this woman’s fate; to my concerned expression he told me, ‘You can’t say I didn’t try with her,’ and I had to admit it was the truth. The food, I might mention, was unremarkable in every way other than its cost. When the woman returned to collect our plates, Charlie stood to meet her. Her head was high, her expression superior, and she said, ‘Well?’ Charlie did not answer, but dropped to a crouch and buried his fist in her stomach, after which she fell back onto a chair and sat bent over, drooling and coughing and generally struggling to regain her breath and composure. I brought her a glass of water, apologizing and explaining that our need of the book was no trifling matter, and that one way or the other we would have it. Charlie added, ‘We hope no more harm will come to you, ma’am. But understand we will do whatever it takes to get it.’ She was in such a state of muted outrage I did not think she heard the logic in our words, but when I escorted her to her room, she handed over the journal all the same, and without any further episode. I insisted she take the extra double eagle and in the end she did take it, which I like to think lessened the indignity of her catching such a terrific punch, but I do not suppose it did, at least not so very much. Neither Charlie nor I was predisposed to this manner of violence against a physical inferior—‘yellow violence’ some would call it—but it was a warranted necessity, as will be shown in the proceeding pages.

What follows is a verbatim transcription of all pertinent sections of the journal of Henry Morris, as related to his mysterious partnership with Hermann Kermit Warm and the defection from his post as the Commodore’s scout and longtime confidant.

* Approached by Warm today, quite out of the blue, and after having scarcely laid eyes upon him for nearly a week. I was passing through the hotel lobby and he snuck to my side, lifting my arm by the elbow like a gentleman helping a lady over patchy terrain. This surprised me, naturally, and I broke off with a start. At this, he looked hurt and demanded, ‘Are we engaged to be married or aren’t we?’ It was nine o’clock in the morning but he was drunken, that was plain. I told him to leave off following me, which surprised him and me both, for though I had sensed a body spying on me these last few days and nights, it was a distant feeling and I had not formulated the words in my own mind. But I saw by his guilty expression that he had been following me, and I was glad to have stood my ground with him. He asked if I would loan him a dollar and I said I would not. Upon receiving my answer he popped his top hat, frayed and dusty, and left the hotel with his thumbs hooked in his vest, his head tilted proudly back. Crossing past the awning, he stepped into the street, and the bright warmth of the sun. This gave him pleasure, and he extended his arms as if to soak in the light. A team of horses was pulling a load of garbage up the hill and Warm climbed casually onto the back of the cart, this accomplished so nimbly as to have gone unnoticed by the driver. It was a graceful exit, I could not deny it, though generally he is looking all the worse than when I first laid eyes on him, not so much from drink as overall misuse of self. He smells ghastly. I should not be surprised if he expires before those two from Oregon City arrive to put him down.* One of the odder days I have yet passed. This morning, Warm was once again waiting in the lobby. I spotted him before he did me, and I made a study of his markedly improved appearance. His clothes had been cleaned and mended and he had bathed. His beard was combed, his face scrubbed, and he looked to be an altogether different person from the man who had accosted me twenty-four hours earlier. Presently he spied me at the base of the stairway and hurried across the lobby to take up my hand, offering his sincerest apologies for his behavior on the previous day. He looked touched, genuinely, when I accepted this, which in turn touched me, or gave me pause, for here was an unknown version of a man I had thought I knew, and knew well. To my increased amazement he then asked if he might treat me to lunch, and though I was not hungry I took him up on this, curious as I was to learn what change of fate had befallen this previously destitute and grubby individual.We retired to a restaurant of his choosing, a charmless garbage chute of a lopsided shack called the Black Skull, where Warm was enthusiastically greeted by the owner, a rank-smelling man with a black-and-red-checkered leather eye patch and not a single tooth in his head. This dubious personage asked Warm how his ‘work’ was progressing, and Warm replied with a single word, ‘Glowingly.’ This made little sense to me but tickled the owner acutely. He showed us to a far table with a curtain, bringing us two bowls of tasteless stew and a loaf of bread, tangy with threat of mold. No bill was ever presented to us, and when I asked Warm about the nature of his and the owner’s alliance he whispered that it was not yet realized but that he had ‘every faith it would come to nothing.’After lunch, when the owner had cleared the table and drawn the curtain for us, Warm’s jovial composure changed, and he became stiff and serious. He took a half minute to gather his thoughts and at last looked me in the eye, saying, ‘I have been watching you, yes, it is the truth. I began to do this at first with the thought of learning your weaknesses. Let me admit it to you then. I have thought about killing you, or having you killed.’ When I asked him why he would wish such a thing he said, ‘But of course the moment I saw you I knew you were the Commodore’s man.’ ‘The Commodore?’ I said vaguely. ‘Whatever in the world is that?’ He shook his head at my novice playacting, dismissing it out of hand, and returned to his speech. ‘My feelings for you quickly changed, Mr. Morris, and I’ll tell you why. You haven’t a dishonest bone in your body. Typically, for example, when a man wishes another man a good morning, he will smile just as long as he is facing the other person, but as soon as he passes by, the smile immediately drops from his face. His smile had been a false one. That man is a liar, do you see?’ ‘But everyone does that,’ I said. ‘It is only a small civility.’ ‘You do not do it,’ he told me. ‘Your smile, though slight, remains on your lips long after you have turned away. You take a genuine pleasure in communing with another man or woman. I saw this happen time and again and thought, if only I could have a person like that on my side, I would see my every idea through to completion. I meant to broach this very subject during my visit of yesterday morning, but my purpose was mislaid, as you will recall. I was nervous to face you, frankly, and I thought a drink would give me courage.’ He lowered his head at the memory. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this morning I awoke in my hovel suffering extreme shame. This was not a new occurrence for me, but today there was something wholly disabling about it. The shame had a heaviness I had never experienced, and hope to never experience again. It was as though I had hit a wall, reached my very limit of self-loathing. Some would call this an epiphany. Call it what you will. But I faced the day today and have vowed to change my life, to cleanse my body, to cleanse my mind, to share my secrets with you, because I know you are a good man, and because a good man is the thing I need most in my life, just now.’Before I could respond to the passionate oration, Warm pulled from his pockets several loose, much-abused papers, and he laid these before me, imploring me to look upon them, which I did, finding page after page of scribbled, intricate numerical lists, figures, and scientific calculations imparting I did not know what. At last I had to admit my ignorance to him. ‘I’m afraid I have no idea what all of this represents,’ I said. ‘It is the bedrock of a momentous discovery,’ he told me. ‘And what is the discovery?’ ‘It is perhaps the most significant scientific event of our lifetime.’ ‘And what is the event?’ Nodding, he collected the papers into an untidy stack, pushing this away beneath his coat. With the corners of the pages peeking over his lapel, he chuckled, regarding me as though I were a very clever man indeed. ‘You are asking for a demonstration,’ he said knowingly. ‘I am not,’ I responded. ‘You will have one, all the same.’ He pulled a watch from his coat and stood to leave. ‘I have to go now, but I will visit you in the morning at your hotel. I will make my demonstration, at the conclusion of which I will have your opinion, and your decision.’ ‘Decision in regards to what?’ I asked, for I had no clue what he was actually proposing. But he only shook his head and said, ‘We can discuss it tomorrow morning. Is this agreeable with your calendar?’ I told the funny man it was, and he gripped my hand, hurrying off to some other crucial location. I watched him pushing through the restaurant, and I saw that he was laughing. And then he was gone.* No sooner had I risen from bed than Warm knocked on my door. His appearance had improved further in that he was wearing a new top hat. When I commented on this he removed it to show me the hat’s every detail, the interior stitching, the softness of its calfskin band, and what he called its ‘general richness and fineness.’ I inquired what he had done with his old hat and he became cagey. I pressed him and he admitted to dropping it over an unsuspecting pigeon sunning itself in the street. The pigeon could not escape from under the weight, and so Warm had the guilty pleasure of watching the topper run away from him, rounding a corner for parts unknown. As he told me this story I spied a covered crate at his feet. I asked what this was for, and he raised his finger, and said, ‘Ah.’He readied himself for the enigmatic demonstration, and soon the crate’s contents sat on the small dining table in the center of my room. Here is what I saw before me. A low-sided wooden box, approximately three feet long by two feet across, a burlap sack containing fresh, strong-smelling earth, a red-velvet sack, and a tin canteen, placed upright. The curtains were drawn and I crossed over to open them, but Warm said he preferred them as they were. ‘It is necessary both for reasons of privacy and for the demonstration to come off most effectively,’ he explained. I returned to the table and watched him pour two-thirds of the earth into the box, smoothing and packing it until it lay level. He then passed me the velvet sack and asked that I inspect its contents. I found it to be filled with gold dust and said as much. He took the sack back and emptied the dust into the box. Of course this shocked me, and I asked what he was doing. He would not say, but instructed that I should commit to memory the shape of the dust (he had poured it out in a tidy circle). He covered this over with the remaining one-third of the earth and spent a full five minutes packing it down, slapping it with his hands so that it was firm as clay. He expended no small amount of energy doing this and was perspiring freely by this point. Now he fetched my washbasin and held this over the earth, slowly pouring the water out so that it nearly met the rim of the box. Having accomplished these curious tasks, he stood back smiling at my doubtless puzzled expression. At last he said, ‘Here is a model of a prospector’s river diggings. Here we have in miniature that which has driven half the world mad. The principal challenge for the prospector is this: How does he get at that which he knows is just beneath his feet? The only answers to the question are hard labor, and good fortune. The former is taxing, the latter, unreliable. For several years now I have been searching out a third method, a surer, simpler one.’ He held up the canteen and unscrewed its top. ‘Correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Morris, but with this formula I believe I have accomplished just that.’ He handed the canteen to me and I asked if I were meant to drink it. ‘Unless you were after a painful ordeal of death, I would advise against it,’ he told me. ‘It is not a tonic?’ I asked. ‘It is a diviner,’ he said, and how strange his voice was as he spoke these words, how odd and haunted, his throat constricted, his pulse fluttering at his temples. Bowing his head then, he emptied the canteen into the box. It was a stinking, purplish liquid. It was thicker than the water but quickly assimilated and disappeared into it. Thirty long seconds passed us by and I stared hard at the water but could see no difference. I raised my eyes to watch Warm’s. His lids were half closed, and I thought he looked somewhat sleepy. I opened my mouth to offer him my condolences, for his experiment was apparently a failure, when I noticed in his eyes the reflection of a gathering, golden glow. When I returned my attention to the box my heart leapt into my throat, for there before me, I swear before God in heaven, the ring of gold was illuminated and shining through the heavy layer of black earth!My reaction to the demonstration was one of complete amazement, and my many sputtering declarations and questions pleased Warm to no end. He soon fell to explaining his plans for the liquid, which are as follows. To dam a secluded section of river and under cover of night, fill the waters with the formula—in greater quantity, obviously—and then, once it has taken hold, to wade the river and remove the gold at his leisure. The glowing, he explained, lasted only precious minutes, but in that time he might cull what would take him weeks were he to use the traditional methods of extraction. Once he had played out a particular segment of river he would move to another, then another, this repeated until he made his pile, and then he would sell the formula’s secret ingredients for a million and spend the rest of his days in what he called the ‘silken arms of glad success.’ By this point I was fairly reeling. All told, it was the most singularly impressive invention I had ever heard of. My only remaining question was slow in coming. I did not want to offend the man or undo the high feelings in the room but it was something that needed addressing, and so I simply came out with it. ‘Why is it you are being so candid with me?’ I asked. ‘How do you know I will not betray your confidences?’ ‘I have already explained my reasons for engaging you,’ Warm replied. ‘I need another man to see this plan through, and I believe you are that man.’ ‘But I am currently receiving a wage to keep watch over you, that you might be killed!’ I exclaimed. ‘Yes, that’s a fact, but let me ask you this. What did the Commodore give as his reason for wanting me dead?’ ‘He says you are a thief.’ ‘And what is it I have stolen?’ ‘This he did not mention.’ Warm spoke emphatically. ‘He could not say, because it is a bald lie. He wants me dead for the reason that I would not give over the ingredients of my gold-finding liquid. Six months back I approached him in Oregon City, requesting funding for a trip to California. I gave a demonstration similar to the one you have just seen and made him an offer I thought was most generous. He would underwrite an expedition, and in return would receive half of the profit. At first he agreed, and promised me full cooperation and support. But when I would not share the recipe he became enraged, and pointed a pistol at my face. He was drunken, and could not focus. When he swayed I snatched a paperweight from his desk and threw it at him. A lucky shot, knocked him dead in the forehead and brought the great man to his knees. As I beat my hasty exit, taking those carpeted steps three at a time, I heard his voice come booming after me. “You are not free of me, Warm. My men will take your formula by force and cut you down to size!” I believed him. And I was not surprised when you arrived, Mr. Morris. What surprised me, and what surprises me still, is that a gentleman such as yourself would elect to spend his lifetime abetting a killer and bully.’The story rang true, all the more so when I remembered the Commodore’s bandaged head wound from six months past. Warm’s words gave me pause, then, and I paced the room awhile, taking stock of things and pondering the possibilities. At last I asked him, not a little desperately, ‘But what do you actually expect of me in all this? What can you possibly hope I’ll accomplish for you?’ ‘It is clear, to my mind,’ he said. ‘I would like for you to go into business with me as a fifty-fifty partner. You will invest whatever money you have toward our maiden expedition, for the cost of food alone would eradicate my small savings. I will need to borrow your quarters to prepare the formula in bulk, and you will assist me in preparing it. Also you will assist me in the actual physical labor once we have set up camp at the river. But most important, you will become the face and voice of the operation, for you have a gift of communication that has proven elusive to me. You will deal with patents and lawyers and contracts and every horrible manner of man-made entanglement—just the type of thing I would bumble terrifically. That will all come later, though. For now, we would enter the wilderness together and see how the formula actually works.’ ‘And what do you think the Commodore would make of my newfound allegiance?’ I wondered. ‘Do you understand fully what you are asking of me?’ At this, he approached and laid his hands on my shoulders. ‘You are no errand runner for a tyrant, Mr. Morris. You are a better man than this. Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.’ My heart became heavy at these words, and Warm, understanding my need to dissect the matter, left me to my thoughts, and said he would return in the morning for my answer. I sat forlornly upon the bed, the box still resting on the table, its glowing light growing ever dimmer, and then disappearing entirely.* It is hours later, and I am still sitting here. The answer lies before me, it is plain to see it, but it is so bold as to be unfathomable. I have no one to turn to in this, and will have to answer the call on my own. I am extremely uneasy.* I did not sleep hardly at all last night, and when Warm returned this morning I formally agreed to take part in his expedition to the River of Light. I am convinced now of his genius, and though I am loath to abandon my post I have elected to follow my heart and do just this. What am I living for, after all? I look upon my past with disgrace. I was herded and instructed. But I will be herded and instructed no more. Today I am born anew, and my life will become my own again. It will be different ever after.

Chapter 38

There was a concentrated silence as Charlie and I sat digesting this remarkable story. I approached the dining table and dragged a finger across its surface. There was a dusting of soil resting upon it; when I showed my trembling hand to Charlie he tossed the journal aside and said, ‘I believe it. I believe it all. The Commodore’s instruction was explicit on one point: Prior to killing Warm I was to obtain by whatever manner of violence necessary what was described to me only as “the formula.” When I asked him what the formula was, he said it was none of my affair, but that Warm would know what I meant, and that once I had it I was to guard it with my life.’

‘Why didn’t you speak to me about this before?’

‘I was told not to. And anyway, what could it have meant to you? It was so vague, I myself hardly gave it a thought. There is always some cryptic obscurity present in the Commodore’s orders. Do you remember the job before last, where I first blinded the man before killing him?’

‘The Commodore said to do that?’

Charlie nodded. ‘He said the man would understand it, and that I should let him “sit awhile in the dark” before putting my bullets in him. This formula business seemed to be more of the same, so far as I could see.’ He stood away from the bed and moved to the window, clasping his hands at the small of his back and peering up the hill. He was silent a minute or more, and when he finally spoke his voice was solemn and soft: ‘I have never minded cutting down the Commodore’s enemies much, brother. It always happens that they are repellent in one way or the other. Lesser villains, men without mercy or grace. But I do not like the idea of killing a man because of his own ingenuity.’

‘I don’t, either. And I’m very glad to hear you say it.’

He exhaled through his nostrils. ‘What do you think we should do?’

‘What do you think we should do?’

But neither of us knew what to do.

Chapter 39

The Black Skull was just as Morris had described it, a lean-to fabricated of scrap wood and tin, situated in a slim alley between two much larger brick buildings, giving it the appearance of being slowly crushed. The interior was similarly unimpressive or negatively impressive: Mismatched chairs and tables were scattered about the room, and a stovepipe leaked acrid smoke from what looked to be a most disorganized and ill-fated kitchen. We entered unhungry and remained so, the smell of horse meat being thick on the air. The checkered eye patch man from the diary was standing in the corner with a tall and picturesque woman, incongruously well dressed in a bright green sleeveless silken gown. These two were engaged in some manner of entertainment and did not notice us as we took up our position at their side.

The woman was a stunning picture, and the gown was the least of it. Her arms were so very beautiful and fine I found myself wanting instantly to put my hands on them; her face, too, was uncommonly lovely, with a handsome Indian profile and a pair of green eyes that when she set them upon me made me jerk my head away, for it was as though she were looking through my body to a point across the room, and when she did this I felt my core doused in ice-cold water. The proprietor glanced at us automatically and nodded before returning to their sport, which I will now describe:

The woman held her palms out. In her right hand was a small piece of fabric, the same that her dress was made of, its edges sewn with a length of heavy golden thread. I do not know why but there was something magnetic about that bit of cloth; I found it pleasing to gaze upon, and a smile appeared on my face. I noticed the proprietor was also staring and smiling. Charlie was staring but his face remained in its typical unfriendly countenance.

‘Are you ready?’ the woman asked the proprietor.

He focused his eyes steadfastly on the fabric and his entire being became stiff. He nodded and said, ‘Ready.’

Just as soon as he uttered the word, the woman began passing the cloth back and forth, snaking it through her fingers and across the knuckles, working with such speed and cunning that the fabric was lost to the naked eye. Now she balled her hands to fists and held them before the proprietor, addressing him in a low and monotone voice: ‘Pick.’

‘Left,’ he said.

The woman opened her left hand: No cloth. She opened the right to reveal the green and gold square; it had been bunched in her grip but was unfolding itself to lay flat. ‘Right,’ she said.

The proprietor handed the woman a dollar and said, ‘Again.’

The woman held out her hands, palms facing up. ‘Are you ready?’

He said that he was. They played another round and this time I focused more intently. The proprietor must have noticed this, for when the woman brought up her fists, he invited me to choose. I believed I knew where the cloth was and gladly joined in. ‘It is there,’ I said. ‘The right hand.’ The woman opened her fist and it was empty. ‘Left,’ she said. I dug into my pocket for a dollar, that I might take a turn.

‘I have not finished my engagement with her,’ said the proprietor.

‘Let me have a single play.’

‘You just have had one.’

‘Let us go one and then the other.’

He grunted. ‘I have engaged her for the time. You may take your turn after I’m through, but for now I need to concentrate completely.’ He turned back to the woman, passing her another dollar. ‘All right,’ he said, and her hands began their slippery movements. Accepting my role of nonparticipant, I paid attention to the woman’s hands just as closely as I was able. I do not think I ever paid such close attention to one particular thing in my life. When her hands came to rest I would have bet every penny I had that the cloth was in her left hand. ‘The left hand,’ said the proprietor, and I twitched in anticipation. Alas, the woman unballed her fist and it was empty, and the proprietor jumped up in anguish. He actually performed a small jump. I hid my feelings as best I could, but inwardly I too was crestfallen. Charlie had been following along with the game; he was partially amused and partially annoyed.

‘What is the purpose of this?’ he asked.

‘To find the bit of cloth,’ said the proprietor innocently.

‘But what is its appeal? How often do you win?’

‘I have never won.’

‘And how many times have you played?’

‘Many, many times.’

‘You are throwing your money away.’

‘So is everyone throwing their money away.’ He regarded us more closely, now. ‘What do you two want, can I ask? Are you here to eat?’

‘We are looking for Warm.’

At the name, the proprietor’s face dropped, and his eyes filled with hurt. ‘Is that a fact? Well, if you find him, you send him my regards!’ This was spoken so bitterly that Charlie was moved to inquire, ‘You have some dispute with him?’

‘I fed him many times over after he dazzled me with his trick of lights and shadows. I should have known he would run out on our bargain.’

‘What was the bargain, exactly?’

‘It is a personal matter.’

I said, ‘You were to escort him to the River of Light, is that it?’

He tensed, and asked, ‘How did you know about that?’

‘We are friends of Warm,’ said Charlie.

‘Warm has no friends besides me.’

‘We have enjoyed a long and healthy friendship with him.’

‘I’m sorry, but I do not believe you.’

‘We are his friends,’ I said, ‘and we know he has others, also. He recently dined here with a Mr. Morris, for example.’

‘What, the dainty little fellow?’

‘They have gone to the river together, is what we have heard.’

‘Warm would never entrust his secrets to a fancy man like that.’ But he pondered this a moment and apparently came to believe it as fact. He sighed. ‘My spirits are low today. I would like to be alone to play this game. You gentlemen have a seat if you want to eat. If not, you will leave me in peace.’

‘Do you have any notion where he was planning on setting up his operation?’

The man did not answer. He and the woman began another round of play. When her fists became still he said, ‘Right hand.’

‘Left,’ said the woman.

He paid out another dollar. ‘Again,’ he said, and the woman’s hands resumed their dancing.

‘We have thought to visit him at his claim,’ I said.

The woman held up her fists and the proprietor exhaled sharply. ‘It is the left.’

‘Right,’ she said.

‘Will you tell us when it was you saw him last then?’ I said.

‘Did you not hear me say I wished for solitude?’ he asked.

Charlie pulled his coat back to reveal his pistols. ‘I want you to tell us everything you know, and right now.’

The proprietor was not surprised or alarmed by this. ‘Hermann spoke of the day you men would come. I did not believe him.’

‘When did you see him last?’ I asked.

‘He came in four or five days ago. He had a new hat to show me. He said he would fetch me the next morning to make for the river. I sat here, in this very room, like an ass, for several hours.’

‘But he never said which river, never gave a clue?’

‘He has always spoken of following his river upstream to the fountainhead.’

‘His river where he had a claim you mean?’

‘That’s what I mean.’

‘Why do you not go there?’

‘Follow after him? And then what? Force myself into their company? No, if he had wanted me to go, he would have come for me. He has made his decision to travel with the other man.’

Charlie found the proprietor’s attitude distasteful. ‘But what of your agreement?’ he asked. ‘What of the gold?’

‘I don’t care about money,’ the proprietor answered. ‘I don’t know why. I should pay more attention to it. No, I was looking forward to an adventure with a friend, is the long and short of it. I had thought Warm and I were close companions.’

These words brought an expression of disgust to my brother’s face. He buttoned his coat and retired to the bar for a drink. I stayed behind to watch the man lose another dollar to the woman, then another.

‘It is hard to find a friend,’ I said.

‘It is the hardest thing in this world,’ he agreed. ‘Again,’ he said to the woman. But he was tiring, it was clear. I left them to their game. My brother had drunk a brandy and was waiting in the road for me. We walked in the direction of Morris’s hotel, passing the livery where we had stabled Tub and Nimble. The hand spied me walking by and called out. ‘It is your horse,’ he said, beckoning for me to enter. Charlie said he would take in the sights and return in half an hour, and we parted ways.

Chapter 40

As I entered the stable I found the hand, a stooped and bowlegged old freckle-spotted bald man in coveralls, inspecting Tub’s eye. I stood next to him and he nodded a hello, saying, ‘He has an uncommonly agreeable personality, this one does.’

‘What about that eye?’

‘Here is what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s going to have to go.’ He pointed and said, ‘Two doors down and there’s an animal doc.’ I asked how much the procedure might cost and he told me, ‘Twenty-five dollars, is my guess. You’ll want to check with the man himself, but I know it’d be close to that.’

‘The entire horse is not worth twenty-five dollars. An eye shouldn’t cost me more than five, I wouldn’t think.’

‘I’ll take it out for five,’ he said.

‘You? Have you done it before?’

‘I have seen it done on a cow.’

‘Where would you do it?’

‘On the floor of the stable. I will drug him with laudanum; he will feel no pain.’

‘But how would you actually remove the eye?’

‘I will use a spoon.’

‘A spoon?’ I said.

‘A soup spoon,’ he nodded. ‘Sterilized, of course. Dig out the eye, snip away the tendons with scissors—that’s how it was with the cow. Then the doc filled the eyehole with rubbing alcohol. This woke the cow up! Doc said he didn’t give it enough laudanum. I’ll give your horse plenty.’

Stroking Tub’s face, I said, ‘There isn’t any medicine I might give him instead? He has had a tough time of it already without being half blind.’

‘A one-eyed horse isn’t worth much to a rider,’ the hand conceded. ‘Your wisest course might be to sell him for his meat. And I have horses for sale out back. Would you like to see them? I’d give you a fair deal.’

‘Let’s go ahead with the eye. We will not be riding very far, and perhaps he will still be of some use to me.’

The hand gathered the tools for the operation and placed these atop a quilt he had lain on the ground beside Tub. He brought out a ceramic bowl filled with water and laudanum; as Tub drank this the hand called me to his side. As if in secret, he whispered, ‘When his legs begin to buckle I want you to push with me. The idea is that he falls directly onto the blanket, understand?’ I said that I did, and we stood together, waiting for the drug to take hold. This did not take long at all and in fact happened so quickly it caught us off guard: Tub’s head dropped and swayed and he stumbled heavily toward the hand and myself, pinning us against the slatted sides of the stable. The hand became frantic under the weight; his face grew red as clay and his eyes bulged as he pushed and cursed. He was scared for his very life, and I found myself laughing at him, squirming around with not the slightest sense of dignity, something like a fly in honey. The hand was humiliated and then infuriated by my lightheartedness; his squirming became all the more frenzied and wild. Fearful the man might faint or otherwise harm himself, I reached up and slapped Tub’s backside as hard as I was able; he winced and stood away from us and the hand shouted, ‘Push, goddamnit, push!’ I choked off my laughter and put all my weight against Tub’s ribs and belly. Between my efforts and the hand’s, in addition to Tub’s woozy attempt to regain his footing, we pushed him clear to the other side of his stable, cracking and snapping the slats as he crashed against them. Now the hand grabbed my arm and yanked me back just as Tub, rebounding off the wall, fell to the ground, his head perfectly placed on the quilt, out cold. The hand was panting and sweat covered, and he regarded me with the most sincere contempt, his twisted fists pinned to his denim hips. ‘Can I ask you, sir, just what in the hell it is that you’re celebrating?’ He was so very upset, standing there before me, it took no small amount of self-control not to laugh again. I managed it, but barely. Speaking penitently, I told him, ‘I’m very sorry about that. There just seemed something funny about it.’

‘To be crushed to death by a horse, this is your idea of carefree entertainment?’

‘I am sorry to have laughed,’ I said again. To change the subject I pointed at Tub and said, ‘At any rate it was a dead shot. Right on the quilt.’

He shook his head and growled lowly, phlegm percolating in his throat. ‘Except for one detail. He is lying on the wrong side! How am I to get at the eye, now?’ He spit the phlegm on the ground and watched it. He watched it a long while. Whatever in the world was he thinking about? I decided to regain the hand’s trust, if only to do right by Tub, for I did not like the idea of the old man performing such a delicate operation while he was angry.

There were several lengths of rope on the wall at the rear of the stable, which I removed and tied to Tub’s ankles, that I might pull him over. The hand surely knew what I was doing but did not offer his help, and began instead to roll a cigarette. He did this with great seriousness, as though it required the extent of his concentration. Tying off Tub’s ankles took five minutes, during which time the hand and I shared not a word, and I was becoming annoyed with him, feeling his sullenness was exaggerated, when he approached with a second cigarette, this rolled for me. ‘Don’t ash in the hay, will you?’ There was a single pulley hanging above the stable; we ran the two lengths of rope through the swivel, one over top of the other. With the both of us pulling it was not difficult to turn Tub over. After our working and smoking together the hand and I were friends again. I could see why he had been angry. He did not understand about my laughing. But we were very different kinds of people, and many of the things I had come to find humor in would make your honest man swoon.

Tub lay dozing and breathing, and the hand went to fetch a spoon that had been sitting in a pot of boiling water in his kitchen. Returning to the stable, he tossed the steaming utensil back and forth to avoid burning himself. His hands, I noticed, were filthy, though our alliance was so tentative I dared not comment. Blowing on the spoon to cool it, he instructed me, ‘Stay away from the rear of this animal. If he comes to the way that heifer did, he’ll kick a hole right through you.’ He pushed the spoon into the socket, and with a single jerk of his wrist, popped the eye out of its chamber. It lay on the bridge of Tub’s nose, huge, nude, glistening, and ridiculous. The hand picked up the globe and pulled it to stretch the tendon taut; he cut this with a pair of rusted scissors and the remainder darted into the black socket. Holding the eye in his palm, now, he cast around for a place to put it. He asked if I would take it and I declined. He went away with the eye and came back without it. He did not tell me what he had done with the thing and I did not ask.

He took up a brown glass bottle and uncorked it, glugging the contents into Tub’s eye socket until the alcohol spilled over, leveling to meet the rim. Four or five pregnant seconds passed when Tub’s head shot back, arching stiffly, and he made a shrill, raspy noise, ‘Heeee!’ and his hind legs punched through the rear wall of the stable. Seesawing on his spine, he regained his footing and stood, panting, woozy, and less an eye. The hand said, ‘Must sting like the devil, the way it wakes them up. I gave him one hell of a lot of laudanum, too!’

By this time Charlie had entered and was standing quietly behind us. He had bought a bag of peanuts and was cracking their shells and eating them.

‘What’s the matter with Tub?’

‘We have taken his eye out,’ I told him. ‘Or this man has.’

My brother squinted, and started. He offered me his peanut bag and I fished out a handful. He offered the bag to the hand, then noticed the man’s outstretched fingers were slick, and pulled it away, saying, ‘How about I pour you out some?’ The hand opened his palm to receive his share. Now we were three men eating peanuts and standing in a triangle. The hand, I noticed, ate the nuts whole, shell and all. Tub stood to the side, shivering, the alcohol draining down his face. He began urinating and the hand, crunching loudly, turned to face me. ‘If you could pay out that five dollars tonight, it would be a help to me.’ I gave him a five-dollar piece and he dropped it into a purse pinned to the inside of his coveralls. Charlie moved closer to Tub and peered into the empty socket. ‘This should be filled with something.’

‘No,’ said the hand. ‘Fresh air and rinses with alcohol are what’s best.’

‘It’s a hell of a thing to look at.’

‘Then you should not look at it.’

‘I won’t be able to control myself. Couldn’t we cover it with a patch?’

‘Fresh air and rinses,’ answered the hand.

‘When will he be fit to travel?’ I asked.

‘Depends on how far you’re going.’

‘We are headed to the river diggings east of Sacramento.’

‘You will be traveling by ferry?’

‘That I don’t know. Charlie?’

Charlie was walking around the stable and smiling at some discreet amusement. He had had another drink or two, judging by his friendliness and happiness. Anyway, he had not heard my question, and I did not press him for an answer. ‘Likely we will be traveling by ferry,’ I said.

‘And when were you planning on going?’

‘Tomorrow, in the morning.’

‘And once you arrive at the diggings, you will be sleeping out of doors?’

‘Yes.’

The hand thought about this. ‘It is too soon to go,’ he said.

I patted Tub’s face. ‘He appears alert.’

‘I am not saying he cannot do it. He is a tough one. But if he were my horse I would not ride him for a week, at least.’

Charlie returned from his perambulations and I asked for more peanuts. He held the bag upside down: Empty. ‘What is the most expensive restaurant in town?’ he asked the hand, who whistled at the question, scratching simultaneously his forehead and genitals.

Chapter 41

The Golden Pearl was simply bathed in wine-red heavy velvet, with hundred-candle chandeliers over each table, bone china plates, silk napkins, and solid silver cutlery. Our waiter was an immaculate, ivory-skinned man in a night-black tuxedo with blue silk spats and a ruby lapel pin that all but blinded a man to look upon it. We asked for steak and wine, preceded by brandy, an order that pleased him fundamentally. ‘Very good,’ he said, writing with a flourish on his leather-bound pad. ‘Very, very good.’ He snapped his fingers and two crystal snifters were placed before us. He bowed and retreated but I had every faith he would soon return, that he would see us through our dining experience with the utmost charm and agility. Charlie took a sip of the brandy. ‘Jesus, that’s nice.’

I took a short drink of it. It tasted entirely separate from any brandy I had ever drunk. It was so far removed from my realm of the brandy-drinking experience I wondered if it might not be some other type of spirit altogether. Whatever it was I enjoyed it very much, and promptly took another, longer drink. Attempting to sound casual about it, I said, ‘Where are we in terms of our being in the Commodore’s service?’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘We are continuing on with the job.’

‘Even though he has misled us?’

‘What do you propose we do, Eli? There isn’t any point in severing ties with him until we investigate this so-called River of Light. Even if we were not working for him, I would still be set on investigating.’

‘And if Warm and Morris are successful? Do you plan to rob them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If they are not, I suppose we will kill them.’

Charlie shrugged, his attitude light and carefree. ‘I really don’t know!’ he said. The waiter brought out our steaks; Charlie pushed a forkful into his mouth and groaned at its delicious taste. I also took a bite, but my mind was on something else. I decided to broach it at once, while Charlie was in a high mood. I said, ‘It occurred to me that if we never spoke of finding Morris’s diary, no one could think us incorrect in returning to Oregon Territory.’

At these words Charlie swallowed, and his gladness from a moment earlier vanished from his face. ‘What in the hell are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘Would you explain it to me, please? Firstly, what would we tell the Commodore when we got back?’

‘We would tell him the truth, that Morris defected with Warm, their whereabouts unknown. We could never be expected to find them without any clue to lead or guide us.’

‘At the very least, the Commodore would expect us to check Warm’s claim.’

‘Yes, and we could say we did and found nothing. Or if you would rather, we could actually visit the place on our return trip. We know Warm won’t be there, after all. My point is, if it’s only the diary’s contents that impels us to continue, then let us burn the book and carry on as though we never laid eyes upon it.’

‘And what if the diary isn’t the only thing that impels us?’

‘It is the only thing that impels me.’

‘What is your actual proposition, brother?’

I said, ‘Between the Mayfield stash, and our savings back home, we have enough to quit the Commodore once and for all.’

‘And why would we do something like that?’

‘It seemed you were for it, before. You have never thought about quitting?’

‘Every man that has ever held a position has thought about quitting.’

‘We have enough to stop it, Charlie.’

‘Stop it and do what?’ He picked a piece of fat from his teeth and flung this onto his plate. ‘Are you trying to ruin my dinner?’

‘We could open the store together,’ I said.

‘What the? What store?’

‘We have had a long go of it, and we both have our health and some of our youth left. Here is our chance to get out.’

He was becoming progressively frustrated by my words, and would shortly drop his fist on the table and lash out at me, truly. But just as he was reaching the point of actual anger, some inner thought calmed him and he returned to sawing his steak. He ate with a full appetite while my food turned cold and when he was finished he called for the check and paid for both plates, despite the cost. I was prepared, then, for him to say something hurtful at the conclusion of the meal, and he did. Draining the last of his wineglass he spoke: ‘We have established, anyway, that you wish to stop. So stop.’

‘Do you mean to say I would stop but you would continue on?’

He nodded. ‘Of course, I would need a new partner. Rex has asked for work in the past, perhaps he could come along.’

‘Rex?’ I said. ‘Rex is like a talking dog.’

‘He is obedient like a dog.’

‘He has the brains of a dog.’

‘I could bring Sanchez.’

At this I coughed, and a trickle of wine flowed from my nostril. ‘Sanchez?’ I sputtered. ‘Sanchez?’

‘Sanchez is a good shot.’

I held my stomach and laughed. ‘Sanchez!’

‘I am merely thinking aloud,’ Charlie said, reddening. ‘It might take some time to find someone suitable. But you’ve made your decision, and that is fine by me. It will be welcome news to the Commodore, also.’ He lit a cigar and sat back in his chair. ‘We will continue with this job and part ways after its completion.’

‘Why do you say it like that? Part ways?’

‘I will stay on with the Commodore and you will turn clerk.’

‘But do you mean to say we won’t see each other?’

‘I’ll see you when I come through Oregon City. Whenever I need a shirt, or some underthings, I will be there.’ He stood and stepped away from the table and I thought, Does he actually want me to stop, or is he merely tricking me into continuing by goading me along? I studied his carriage for the answer to this; I received a clue when his brow unknotted and his spine went slack—he was pitying me, in all my wounded wretchedness. He said, ‘Tomorrow morning we will ride out to find Warm and Morris. Let us finish the job and see where we stand afterward.’ He turned and walked from the restaurant. The elegant waiter appeared beside me, inhaling windily as I stood to go, for my meal was all but untouched, and he was insulted that such beautiful food should go to waste. ‘Sir!’ he called after me, his tone richly indignant. ‘Sir! Sir!’ Ignoring him, I walked into the wildness of the San Francisco night: Swaying lanterns on passing carts, a whip’s constant recoil, the smell of manure and burned oil, and a ceaseless, all-around caterwauling.

I returned to the room to sleep and saw no more of Charlie until morning, when I awoke to find him fully dressed and washed, clean shaven and pink cheeked; his movements were sharp and alert and I felt a hopefulness that this change in his temperament was related somehow to our argument of the previous evening, that he had elected to remain relatively sober and to rise early so I might by association have a better time of it, and that we might view the job from the moral standpoint. But now I saw his pistol handles were gleaming in their holsters—he had cleaned and polished them, as was his habit prior to the completion of an assignment. His decision to pass a peaceful night without excessive drinking was not done to please or soothe me but so that he might be fully present for the probable murder of Warm and Morris. I rose from the bed and sat at the table across from him. I found I could not face him, and he said, ‘It will never do, your pouting like this.’

‘I’m not pouting.’

‘It’s pouting, all right. You can pick it up again just as soon as the job’s done, but for now you’re going to have to cork it.’

‘I tell you I’m not.’

‘You can’t even look at me.’

I looked. And it was as though there was nothing in the world wrong with him, his manner was perfectly at ease. I imagined what he in turn was seeing in me, hair wild, rubbery belly pushing against an unclean undershirt, eyes red and filled with hurt and mistrust. It came over me all at once, then: I was not an efficient killer. I was not and had never been and would never be. Charlie had been able to make use of my temper was all; he had manipulated me, exploited my personality, just as a man prods a rooster before a cockfight. I thought, How many times have I pulled my pistol on a stranger and fired a bullet into his body, my heart a mad drum of outrage, for the lone reason that he was firing at Charlie, and my very soul demanded I protect my own flesh and blood? And I had said Rex was a dog? Charlie and the Commodore, the two of them together, putting me to work that would see me in hell. I had a vision of them in the great man’s parlor, their heads enshrouded in smoke, laughing at me as I sat on my comical horse in the ice and rain outside. This had actually taken place; I knew it to be the truth. It had happened and would happen again, just as long as I allowed it.

I said, ‘This is the last job for me, Charlie.’

He answered without so much as a flinch: ‘Just as you say, brother.’

And the rest of the morning in that room, packing and washing and preparing for our travels—not another word exchanged between us.

Chapter 42

The hand met me at the stable door.

‘How is he?’ I asked.

‘He slept well. Not sure how he’ll ride, but he’s doing better than I figured he might.’ He handed me a bottle of alcohol. ‘Twice a day,’ he said. ‘Morning and night, till you run out. Make sure you tie him to something when you do it. Just douse him and run, is my thought.’

‘Have you doused him today?’

‘No, and I do not plan to. I did it just the once to show you the way, but from here on, it’s all yours.’

Wanting to get it over with, I unstopped the bottle and took a step toward Tub when the hand said, ‘I wish you’d take him outside. I just barely got the first hole covered without him kicking a new one.’ He pointed and I saw his pitiable patch job, the damaged timber gone over with scraps. I led Tub out and tied him to a hitching post. His socket had crusted blood and pus around its rim, and without the eye to hold its form the lid sagged at its center. I poured in a good amount of the alcohol and stepped clear of him. ‘Heee!’ said Tub, kicking and bucking and urinating and defecating. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about that, Tub. Sorry, sorry.’ His discomfort passed and I retrieved the saddle from the stable. Charlie led Nimble out and stood beside Tub and I.

‘Ready?’ he said.

I did not answer but climbed onto Tub. His back and legs had more give than before, his muscles stringy with fatigue; also he was confused by the loss of half his sight, and he craned his neck to the left to see from his right eye. I backed him into the road and he walked in a tight, full circle, then another. ‘He is getting his bearings,’ I said.

‘It is wrong to ride him so soon,’ said Charlie, climbing on Nimble. ‘You can see he needs rest.’

I pulled hard on the reins and Tub ceased his spinning. ‘Let’s not pretend you care for his well-being all of a sudden.’

‘I don’t give a damn about the horse. I’m talking about what’s right for the job.’

‘Oh! Yes! Of course! The Job! I nearly forgot about it! Our preeminent purpose! Let’s talk about it some more! I will never tire of the subject so long as I am living!’

I found my lip was quivering; my feelings were so deeply injured that morning, looking at my brother on his fine, tall horse, and knowing he did not love me the way I had always loved and admired him and looked up to him; my lip quivered and I found myself shouting like this so that people walking past made comments and stared.

‘The Job! Yes! The Job! But of course that’s what you were referring to!’

Charlie’s eyes hooded with contempt, and shame enveloped me like a fever. Without a word he turned and rode off, cutting through the crowded streets and disappearing on the far side of a covered wagon. I scrambled to regain sight of him but Tub continued to crane his neck and walk sideways; I jabbed him with my heels and the pain righted him, but his breath was ragged as we ran, and my shame redoubled. I very much wanted to simply quit then, to stop and walk away from Tub, and from the job, and Charlie, to return on a new horse for my pile in Mayfield and construct a separate life, with the pale bookkeeper or without, just as long as everything was restful and easy and completely different from my present position in the world. This was my dream, and it was a powerful, vivid one, but I did nothing to enact it, and Tub continued his running and wheezing and I made it to the beach and rejoined Charlie, falling in beside him as we headed for the ferry landing. We passed the spot where the horse belonging to the man with the winch had died. The animal was partially skinned, with a good portion of its meat hacked away. Crows and gulls fought over what was left, hopping and pecking, the clammy flesh gone purple, the wind coating it in sand, and the flies insinuating themselves where they could. I felt San Francisco standing behind me but I never looked back, and I thought, I did not enjoy my time here.

Chapter 43

The ferry was a smaller-sized paddle wheeler called Old Ulysses that had a corral at its foremost end that housed horses alongside sheep and cows and pigs. Just as soon as Charlie tied off Nimble he left me; I did not follow after him but stayed behind to pet Tub and say sweet things to him, offering him comfort with my nearness and kindness, belated as it was. I had a plan to stay down there for the entire eight-hour voyage but the water was rough and the pigs became seasick (only the pigs became seasick), and I found it necessary to take in the air topside. I never once saw Charlie and nothing of consequence happened for the rest of the trip, except for this: I asked a woman if she had the time, and she looked me up and down and said, ‘I have no time to share with you,’ and walked away. I bought some mealy apples from a blind man and fed these to Tub as the boat was shoring up in Sacramento. His legs were trembling. It was late afternoon.

Charlie and I rode clear of civilization and entered into a forest of oak trees, dense and damp and impossible to navigate incautiously. It was slow going, made all the more so by the fact of our not speaking. I thought, I will not speak first. Then Charlie spoke first.

‘I would like to discuss our methods for dealing with Warm.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let us cover the angles.’

‘That’s it. Starting with our employer. What might he want us to do?’

‘Kill Morris first, quickly, and without malice. From Warm, extract the formula, then kill him, also, but slowly.’

‘And what would we do with the formula?’

‘Return this to the Commodore.’

‘And what would he do with it?’

‘He would claim to be its author, and he would become ever more infamous and rich.’

‘And so the actual question is: Why are we doing this for him?’

‘But this is just what I have been getting at.’

‘I want to talk it through, Eli. Answer me, please.’

I said, ‘We are doing this for a wage, and out of your reverence for a powerful man whom you hope to one day usurp or somehow become.’

Charlie made a stretched-out face that said: I did not know you knew that. ‘All right. Let us assume that is true. Would it make sense then to empower the Commodore? To enable him in such a significant way?’

‘It would not make sense.’

‘No. Now, would it make sense for us to follow the Commodore’s instruction just shy of the last? Just shy of handing over the formula?’

‘To kill the two innocent men and steal their hard-won idea for ourselves?’

‘Morals come later. I asked if it would make sense.’

‘It would at least make sense, yes.’

‘Fine. Now, let us discuss the consequences of disobeying the Commodore.’

‘It would be unpleasant. I should think we would be hunted all our lives.’

‘Unless?’ he said, lips upturned. ‘Unless?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We would have to kill him.’

‘Kill him how?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lie in wait for him? Make it known we are after him? Go to war with his lieutenants? He has men in most every outpost and town, remember.’

‘No, the only way would be to get it over with right off. To head back just as if we were still working for him, then kill him in his house, and flee.’

‘Flee where? Who would come after us if the man himself was dead?’

‘I would be surprised if he did not have explicit orders to be carried out in case of untimely passing.’

Charlie nodded. ‘He absolutely does. He has spoken to me about it in the past. “If my blood is spilled prematurely, there will be an ocean of blood spilled in response to it.” So: How might this inform our plans?’

I said, ‘The only way would be to kill him in total secrecy.’

‘Total secrecy,’ Charlie agreed.

‘We would have to arrive under cover of night and shoot him as he sleeps. After this, run into the wild and hide away for many days, then return empty-handed, as though coming from San Francisco, claiming to have missed the formula, to have lost Morris and Warm. We would act very surprised when we learned of the Commodore’s death, and we would offer our services in tracking down and killing any of those possibly involved.’

‘That is all fine, except for the last part,’ he said. ‘If the Commodore is murdered, accusations will fly in every direction, and there will be a good deal of violence because of it. I would be surprised if we were not accused; and it would be suspicious if we in turn did not level accusations of our own. A lot of blood work then, and for what? When the man with the money is already gone?’

‘What is your thought, brother?’

‘What if the Commodore simply died in his sleep? A pillow over the face, is all.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s the way. And we would have the formula, also.’

‘We would have it, but would not be able to use it for a time.’

‘We could live off the Mayfield stash, plus our savings.’

‘Or we could find a private river and work with the formula anonymously.’

‘It would be a difficult thing to keep hidden.’

‘Difficult but not impossible. We would likely have to bring a few more into the fold. I don’t know how Warm thinks he will be able to dam a river with just the two of them.’

‘Let us return to the moral question,’ I said.

‘The moral question,’ said Charlie. ‘Yes, let’s.’

‘I’ve never much liked Mr. Morris on a personal, man-to-man basis. Or should I say he has never much liked or respected us, which colors my feelings for him. But I will admit to having a certain respect for him.’

‘Yes, I feel the same way. He is honorable. Even with this abandonment of his post he is.’

‘He is that much more honorable because of it, is my way of seeing things. And as for Warm, I can’t help it. I admire him for his intelligence.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Well, I don’t know what else to say.’

‘You would rather not kill them.’

‘That’s what it is. I have been thinking about the last job, where we lost our horses. Do you recall those men we were up against? All they were after was blood and more blood, and it made no difference to them whose it was. They were living just to die. And our role was ironclad the moment we stepped onto their property.’

Charlie paused, remembering. ‘They were a rough bunch, it’s true.’

‘It felt right to me, because whether or not they had wronged the Commodore they were evil men, truly, and they would have killed us if we hadn’t moved first. But these two, Warm and Morris. It would be more like killing children or women.’

Charlie was quiet. He was thinking about the two futures, the immediate and the distant. I had more to tell him but did not interrupt, as I felt I had said enough to make my point clear. I was relieved we had had this talk, and that Charlie was not outwardly opposed to my way of thinking. I was also relieved the bad feelings from San Francisco were abating or had abated. But then we often came about our truces through this kind of clinical discussion.

Chapter 44

Darkness fell before we could locate Warm’s claim, and we camped under the oaks. I doused Tub and he screamed, kicking and bucking; when the pain passed him he lay down on the ground to pant and stare at nothing. His appetite was poor but I still believed he had a good deal of life left in him, that he would soon begin his recuperation. As I drifted away to sleep I watched the treetops bowing and clashing in the wind. I could hear the river but could not place it; one moment I felt it was to the north, another moment I was certain it was to the south. In the morning I discovered it was to the east. We found Warm’s claim after lunch and decided to spend the night there, that Tub might be rested for a full day’s ride, and that Charlie and I might focus ourselves for what lay ahead of us.

The claim was an attractive and comfortable site, and we camped above the river on a grassy sandbank. A small sign posted at the foot of the claim line read: THESE WATERS ARE THE TEMPORARY PROPERTY OF HERMANN KERMIT WARM, AN HONEST MAN ON SPEAKING TERMS WITH MOST EVERY ANGEL IN HEAVEN. THOSE WHO DIP THEIR PANS IN HIS OWN PRIVATE STRETCH WILL FIND THEMSELVES SWARMED, INSULTED, TAPPED WITH SHARP HARPS AND LIKELY LIGHTNING, TOO. Vines were painted elaborately around these words. Warm had taken his time with the project.

Fat trout hung in the current and Charlie shot one in the head for our dinner. Upon receiving the bullet the fish issued a cloud of blood and steered sideways as the current pulled him down river. Charlie waded in and picked the fish up by the tail, flinging it through the air and onto the bank where I was sitting. I gutted and skinned it and fried it in pork fat. It was four or more pounds and we ate all but the head and innards. The thick green grass made for excellent bedding and we both slept well. In the morning a man stood over us, small and grizzled and smiling, a happy prospector reentering civilization with his hard-won pouch of dust and flakes.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I was just about to make a fire for my coffee when I smelt your smoke. I’d be happy to share a cup, if I might borrow your heat.’

I told him to go ahead and he stoked the coals, setting his blackened kettle directly atop the embers. He spoke to himself as he did this, offering hushed words of encouragement and grace: ‘Good, good. Tidy, tidy. Very nicely done.’ Every half minute or so he suffered a fit of twitches and I thought, He has been alone in the wilderness for too long, and has become two people.

‘You are heading into San Francisco?’ asked Charlie.

‘You bet I am. Four months I’ve been away, and the closer I get I can’t hardly believe it. I got it all worked out to the last detail.’

‘Got what all worked out?’

‘All the things I’m going to do.’ We did not ask that he elaborate, but he needed no invitation to continue: ‘First thing I’m going to do is rent a clean room, up high so I can look down and see everything as it passes. The second thing I’m going to do is call for a piping hot bath. Third thing is I’m going to sit in it with the window open and listen to the town. Fourth thing I’m going to do is have a shave, to the bare cheek, and a haircut, close-cropped and parted. Fifth thing I’m going to do is buy a new outfit from the hat to the boots. Shirt, undershirt, pants, stockings, all of it.’

‘I have to go to the toilet,’ Charlie interrupted, and he walked away into the forest.

The prospector was undisturbed by my brother’s rudeness and in fact did not appear to notice it. He was staring into the fire as he spoke; he probably would have continued talking even if I had left: ‘Sixth thing I’m going to do is eat a steak as big as my head. Seventh thing I’m going to do is get very, very drunk. Eighth thing I’m going to do is get a pretty girl and lie down a while. Ninth thing I’m going to do is talk with her about her life, and she’ll ask about mine, and we’ll go back and forth like this, civilized and properly. Tenth thing I’m going to do is no one’s business in the world but my own. Eleventh thing I’m going to do is send her away and stretch out in the clean, soft bed, like this.’ He stretched out his arms as wide as he was able. ‘Twelfth thing, boy, I’m going to sleep and sleep and sleep!’

Now the water was boiled and he poured us each a cup of coffee, the taste of which was so poor it actually startled me, and it took my every bit of politeness not to spit the liquid out. Dredging my finger along the bottom of the cup, I brought up a mound of grit. I smelled and then licked this and identified it as dirt. People will often describe something as ‘tasting like’ dirt, but this was not the case, here—my cup held earth and hot water, nothing more. I believe the man, through some lonely prospector mania, had begun brewing dirt and tricking himself into believing it was coffee. I had a mind to broach the subject with him but he was so pleased to be sharing, and I did not want to upset his pride; at any rate, who did I think I was to try and undo what had surely taken many days and nights to become fact for him? I decided to wait until his next fit of twitches and then pour out the dirt-water while he was not looking. Charlie came back from the woods and I informed him with secret looks that he should not drink the ‘coffee’; when the prospector offered him a cup he declined. ‘More for us,’ the prospector told me, and I weakly smiled.

‘I am wondering if you’ve seen a couple friends of ours,’ Charlie said. ‘They would have been heading upriver a few days ago. Two men, one bearded, one not.’

‘Had a good deal of gear with them?’ he said.

‘The one had a red beard.’

‘That’s right. Had a good deal of gear with them. Two mules loaded down with twice what Benny’s carrying.’ He pointed to his mule, Benny, standing next to Tub and Nimble. I did not think a mule could carry any more than what he was.

‘What type of gear?’ I asked.

‘Pans, canvas, rope, timber. All the usual. Only thing strange was they had four twenty-five-gallon casks, two per mule. The redhead said they were filled with wine. Wouldn’t sell me a drop, the miser! I like a drink as much as anyone, but hauling that much into the wild’s just the type of greediness that’ll ruin you. You can work a mule to the point where he won’t ever recover. These two were well on their way, it looked like to me.’

‘Any idea where they were headed?’

‘They were keen to know the location of a beaver dam I told them about. I’d only brought it up as a place they’d want to stay away from, but they had to have every detail.’

‘Where is it?’ asked Charlie.

‘Now you got the same look in your eye they had! And I’ll tell you just what I did them: That stretch isn’t worth your time. Those beavers’ll strip every bit of wood from your camp just as soon as you look away, and whatever you put in the river—a rocker or cradle or anything—is as good as gone. A damned nuisance, is all they are. Hey, that’s a good one! Get it? Dam-ed?’ He suffered a fit of twitches and I poured out my dirt-water into the grass. The moment his fit ceased he spied that my cup was empty and made me another, encouraging me to drink. I held the cup to my mouth, clamping my lip on the edge, thus allowing none of the liquid into my mouth.

Charlie said, ‘If our friends were headed there, we would like to pay them a visit.’

‘Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. But you’ll know you’re close when you pass a camp of men four or five miles up from here. Do not stop in hopes of making friends, for this group has no interest in socializing. In fact they are downright rude. But no matter. Two miles more, and you’ll see the dam. You can’t miss the thing it’s so big.’ He hefted the kettle to pour himself another cupful of his brew and I noticed he winced at the effort. I asked if he was injured, and he nodded. He had fought an Indian with knives and won, he said, but the Indian had taken a piece out of him, which weakened him, and he had lain beside the corpse for long hours before he could summon the strength to stand. He pulled back his shirt to show us the divot beneath his breast. Its edges were scarring but it was still scabbed at its pit—a nasty wound. I would have put its age at three weeks. ‘Got me a good one, there. I guess I got him better, though.’ He stood away from the fire and returned to Benny, strapping his cup and kettle to the mule’s load.

‘Where is your horse?’ asked Charlie.

‘That’s what I was fighting the Indian about, didn’t I say? He stole away my pal Jesse the one night while I was sleeping. When he came back the next for Benny, I was ready to go. Well, it’s a fine day for walking. And if Old Ben can do it, so should I be able to.’ He tipped his hat to us. ‘Thanks for the company. I’ll raise a drink for you, down in town.’

‘Hope you see all your plans through,’ I told him, and he smiled a crazy smile and said, ‘Heh!’ He turned and walked away, with Benny bringing up the rear. Once he was out of earshot, Charlie asked, ‘What was wrong with the coffee?’ I passed him my cup; he took a tentative sip and discreetly spit it out. His face had no expression. ‘This is dirt,’ he said.

‘I know it is.’

‘The man brews and drinks dirt?’

‘I don’t think he thinks it’s dirt.’

Charlie lifted the cup and took another sip. He pushed this around in his mouth, and again he spit it out. ‘How could he not think it’s dirt?’

I thought of this twitching prospector and the chicken-holding prospector and the dead, headless prospector and said, ‘It would seem to me that the solitude of working in the wilds is not healthy for a man.’ Charlie studied the surrounding forest with a kind of suspicion or mistrust. ‘Let’s move on,’ he said, turning to fold his bedroll.

Tub was looking badly, and I was loath to douse him, as I thought the energy the dousing would expend was energy necessary to get us to the beaver dam. He was breathing hard and would not drink water and I said to Charlie, ‘I believe Tub is dying.’ He gave Tub a brief inspection; he did not say he agreed with me but I could see he did. He said, ‘It is only another few miles, and hopefully we’ll be there long enough that Tub can rest up and regain his strength. Better give him his alcohol, and let’s get started.’ I explained I thought it best to skip the dousing, and this gave Charlie an idea. He fetched a bottle from his saddlebags; his face wore a smile as he showed it to me. ‘Don’t you remember? The tooth doctor’s numbing liquid?’

‘Yes?’ I said, not understanding.

‘Well? How about giving Tub a splash of this prior to the alcohol? Just pour it in and let it sit awhile. It’ll take the edge off that sting, I’ll bet you.’

I was not sure the liquid would be effective without being injected, but I was curious enough that I went along with Charlie and poured a small amount of the medicine into Tub’s eyehole. He started and became stiff, expecting the pain from the alcohol, I thought, but the sting never arrived and he returned to his panting. Now I rushed up and doused him with the alcohol, and again he grew rigid, but he never screamed, he never bucked or urinated, and I was pleased Charlie had thought of it; and he, too, was happy with himself, and he patted Tub’s nose and seemed to genuinely wish him well. At this, we set off upriver. There was an auspicious feeling between us that I hoped we might hold on to.

Chapter 45

The camp south of the beaver dam was a blighted affair, little more than a fire pit and scattered bedrolls, with tools and wood scrap littered randomly in the area. At the edge of the camp stood three rough-looking men, glaring as we came near. They were a filthy group even by prospector standards, their beards matted, faces blackened with soot or mud, their clothing stained and unkempt; everything about them was dark and dingy in fact, save for the color of their eyes, which were a uniform shade of the most striking blue. Brothers, I thought. Two of them held rifles at the ready; the third was armed with pistols in holsters. Charlie called to them, ‘Has any of you seen a pair of men heading north some days ago? One of them bearded, the other not?’ When none among them answered, I said, ‘They had two mules with them, burdened with casks of wine?’ Still no reply. We passed them by and I kept an eye on their movements, for they struck me as the types who might shoot a man in his back. Once they were out of sight, Charlie said, ‘Those were not your typical prospectors.’

‘They were killers,’ I agreed. Likely they were hiding from something in their collective past, making do in the meantime by working the diggings, and judging by their looks they were not having much of a time with it.

Another mile up the river and Tub began hacking and coughing. Through my legs I could feel a hollow dryness rattling his rib cage, and I noticed long tendrils of thick blood dropping from his lips into the river. I reached down and touched his mouth with my palm; when I brought up my hand I saw the blood was black. I showed this to Charlie, who said we were close enough to the dam that we might make a temporary camp and approach Warm and Morris on foot. We dismounted and led the horses into the woods. I found a shady spot for Tub and the moment I removed his saddle he lay down on the ground. I did not think he would get up again, and I was sorrowful for having treated him so poorly. I set out my bowl next to him, filling this with water from my canteen, but he would not drink. I poured out some feed onto the ground but he had no interest in this either, he only lay there panting.

‘I don’t know where we’re going to get you another horse out here,’ said Charlie.

‘He may improve with rest,’ I said.

Charlie stood behind me, waiting. I was crouched before Tub, stroking his face and repeating his name in hopes of comforting him. His empty eyehole blinked, caving in on itself; his bloody tongue hung out of his mouth, dripping thickly into the dirt. Oh, I felt very low about it all of a sudden, and I did not like myself in the least.

‘We have to go now,’ said Charlie. He put one hand on my shoulder and the other on his pistol. ‘Do you want me do it.’

‘No. Let’s just go, and leave him.’

We walked away from the horses and to the north, to see about Warm, at last.

Chapter 46

Morris and Warm’s camp was walled in on both sides by steep, densely forested hills. We stood at the apex of the westernmost rise, looking down upon their well-groomed settlement: The horses and mules stood shoulder to shoulder in a line, a small fire smoldered before their crisp canvas tent, and their tools and saddles and bags lay in neat stacks and rows. It was late afternoon and there was a chill in the air; the sun cast an orange-white light against the trees and reflected off the river’s surface, a silvery, spidery vein. Down shore of the camp sat the humpbacked beaver dam, the water before it pooling in a lazy circle. Who could say whether the formula worked or not, but here was a fine location to test it.

I saw some movement from within the shelter and presently Morris appeared, crouching to breach its opening, and looking so unlike the fashionable and perfumed person I had known in the past I did not at first recognize him. His linens were sullied with mud and salt rings, his hair a perfect mess; his pants and sleeves were rolled back, the exposed flesh stained wine-purple. A grin was fixed to his lips and he was continually speaking, presumably to Warm, still in the tent, but he stood at such a distance from us we could not hear what he was saying. We descended on their camp at a diagonal route, walking cautiously, with care not to upset any rocks and send these tumbling down to alert the men of our approach. Nearing the base of the hill, we lost sight of the camp in a shallow; cresting this we could hear Morris’s voice and discovered he was not speaking to anyone at all, but singing a happy-worker tune. Charlie tapped my shoulder and pointed at the tent; from where we stood we could make out the interior, which was empty. At the same moment I saw this, there sounded a curt instruction from above my and Charlie’s heads: ‘Keep those hands out or it’s a bullet in the brain for the both of you.’ We looked up to find a feral, gnomelike individual sitting on the branch of a tree. He had a pistol, a baby dragoon, pointed at us. His eyes were shimmering and victorious.

‘This will be our Hermann Warm,’ said Charlie.

‘That is correct,’ said the man, ‘and your knowing my name leads me to know yours. You are the Commodore’s men, isn’t that right? The fabled Sisters brothers?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You have come a long way to get me. I am on the verge of feeling flattered. Not quite there, but close.’ I shifted where I stood and Warm spoke sharply: ‘Move like that again and I’ll kill you. You think I am fooling around, gentleman, but I have you cold and will pull the trigger, make no mistake.’ He meant what he said, and it was as though I could feel the precise, heated spot where the bullet would enter my skull. Warm, like Morris, was barefoot and wearing his pants rolled up; also the flesh of his legs and hands was stained purple and I thought, Has the gold-finding solution been effective? I could not tell from his expression, for he only looked fierce and protective. Charlie noticed the purple staining also and asked, ‘Have you been making wine, Warm?’

Rubbing his ankles together, cricketlike, Warm answered, ‘Not by a long shot.’

‘Then are you a richer man today than yesterday?’ I asked.

Suspiciously, he said, ‘The Commodore spoke to you about the solution?’

‘In his vague way, yes,’ said Charlie. ‘But we learned the hard facts from Morris.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ Warm said.

‘Ask him yourself.’

‘I believe I will.’ Without looking away from us he whistled shrilly, twice and briefly; in the distance came an identical noise and Warm performed the whistling once more. Up through the trees came Morris then, bounding boyishly over the rise and smiling still, until he saw Charlie and me, wherein he froze, and his face washed over in unqualified terror. ‘It’s all right, I’ve got them,’ said Warm. ‘I climbed up for a look-see downriver, and lucky I did, too. Saw these rascals creeping along in the direction of our camp. They have been made aware of our little experiment here, and they’re trying to tell me it was you who told them about it.’

‘They are lying,’ said Morris.

Charlie said, ‘It wasn’t just you, Morris. The one-eyed man at the Black Skull let us know where you planned to camp. But it was your diary that proved indispensable.’

Watching Morris’s face, I witnessed his tortured recollection. ‘The bed,’ he said wretchedly. ‘I’m sorry, Hermann. Goddamn me, I’d completely forgotten it.’

‘Left it behind, did you?’ said Warm. ‘Don’t take it too bad, Morris. It’s been a busy time, and we’ve been working hard, and anyway the blame should be shared. Didn’t I let that cyclops in on our plans? And for what? A few bowls of rancid stew.’

‘Still,’ said Morris.

‘Don’t give it another thought,’ Warm said. ‘We got to them before they got to us. That’s the important thing. The question now is, what to do with them?’

Morris’s face went blank. ‘The only thing is to shoot them.’

‘Would you look at that?’ said Charlie. ‘A week in the wilderness and the little man’s out for blood.’

‘Wait now,’ said Warm.

‘There is no other way,’ Morris continued. ‘We’ll bury them and be done with it. It will be a month before the Commodore stages any further action against us, and by then we will be long gone.’

‘I should definitely feel more at ease with their threat eliminated,’ Warm ventured.

‘Shoot them, Hermann. Get it over with.’

Warm pondered this. ‘It upsets my stomach to think of it.’

‘Can I say something?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Morris. ‘Hermann, shoot them. They are going to move.’

‘If they move I really will kill them. You there, the big one, go ahead and speak.’

I said, ‘Let us into your fold to work with you. We have quit our posts with the Commodore and have no allegiance to him any longer.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Warm. ‘Your very presence here betrays you.’

‘We are here because of what we read in the diary,’ said Charlie. ‘We want to see your River of Light.’

‘You want to poach it, is what you mean to say.’

‘We are the both of us impressed with your enterprise and strength of mind,’ I told him. ‘And we are sympathetic to Morris’s decision to quit the Commodore. As I said, we have made the same decision, and were impelled to visit you.’

My words, spoken sincerely, gave Warm pause, and I sensed him watching and wondering about me. When he finally replied, however, his tidings were not in my favor: ‘The problem is that even if you are split from the Commodore—which I doubt is the truth—but even if it is so, I have no faith in your motivations. Simply put, you are a pair of thieves and killers, and we have no place for you in our operation.’

‘We are not thieves,’ said Charlie.

‘Merely killers then, is that it?’

‘You are both haggard from the work,’ I said. ‘We will assist you with the labor and offer our protection, also.’

‘Protection from whom?’

‘From whomever should come up against you.’

‘And who will protect us from you?’

‘Let us into your fold,’ said Charlie. His patience had left him and his tone was demanding, which sealed it for Warm, who no longer spoke, and when I looked up I could see his head listing back as he trained his barrel at Charlie. I was moving to draw my pistols when Warm, still listing and finally listing too far, lost his balance and fell backward from the branch, somersaulting through the air and disappearing mutely into a swath of tall ferns. Morris, unarmed, spun and ran through the trees; Charlie raised a pistol in his direction but I reached up and caught his arm. He raised his other pistol but Morris had ducked out of sight. He broke away from me to give chase but Morris had had too much of a head start to be caught and Charlie abandoned this, doubling back to where Warm had dropped—except the man was no longer there, having snuck away undetected. Charlie looked impotently at the flattened ferns, then up at me. A moment passed and he burst into baffled laughter, his face pale and disbelieving. This meeting with Warm, despite the brandishing of pistols, had been so different from our earlier experiences that he could not help but be amused by it. His amusement soon receded, however, and as we returned to our camp to regroup he became simply angry.

Chapter 47

Tub was missing when we returned. He had been so weak it did not occur to me to tie him off, but while we were gone he had stood and walked away. I followed the trail of plump, dust-covered blood orbs leading over the short hill that walled in our camp; the far side of this was near vertical and he had fallen, sliding fifty yards under his own weight before coming to rest at the root of a wide sequoia. He was butted up to this by the spine and his legs were pointed ignobly skyward and I thought, What a life it is for man’s animals, what a trial of pain and endurance and senselessness. I considered climbing down to check on him, for if he was still drawing breath it would only be proper to put a bullet in him, but his still features illustrated the arrival of unmistakable death, and I turned away from him, back to camp to find Charlie stocking his ammunition.

Tub’s death proved useful in diffusing Charlie’s upset, concerned as he was for my well-being, offering me encouraging words, a promise to go halves on a new horse, one who would be just as fit as Nimble or better. I went along with his comforts, acting solemn and thoughtful, but in truth I was not particularly unhappy about Tub’s passing. Now that he was gone it was as though my sympathy for him too was gone and I was looking forward to my life without him. He was a kindhearted and good animal but he had been a significant burden to me; our lives were not suited as mates. Many months later I became sentimental about him, and this feeling is still with me today, but at the time of his actual demise I experienced merely a lifted weight.

‘Are you ready?’ Charlie asked.

I nodded that I was. Knowing the answer, I asked anyway: ‘What will our course of action be?’

‘Force is the only way,’ he said.

‘Surely they must know that we could have killed them both but didn’t.’

‘I would have killed them, if you had not interfered.’

‘For all they know, though, we elected not to.’ Charlie did not respond and I offered, somewhat lamely, ‘If we were to enter their camp without arms, our hands in the air.’

‘I refuse to honor the statement with a reply.’

‘I am only hoping to discuss each possibility.’

‘There are but two. To leave them in peace or to visit them again. And if we visit them again, force will be necessary. They would have killed us before if it had not been for their clumsiness, and now there will be no hesitation on their part. Morris will be armed, and there will be no talking between us and them.’ He shook his head. ‘Force is the only way out of this, brother.’

‘But if we were to return to Mayfield,’ I began.

‘We’ve already been through that,’ Charlie interrupted. ‘If you want to go, go, but you will have to walk back to Sacramento for a new horse. It is your choice to make. I will see this job through with or without you.’

I made the decision to go with Charlie, then. I thought, He’s right. We tried to enter into their camp peaceably, but they would not have us. It was all the mercy I could hope for from my brother, and the opportunity to visit the River of Light was too unusual for either of us to turn away from it. My attitude about this decision was that it would be the last bit of bloodshed for my foreseeable future, if not the rest of my life; I told Charlie this and he told me that if the thought brought me comfort I should embrace it. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you’re forgetting about the Commodore.’

‘Oh, yes. Well, after him then.’

Charlie paused. ‘And there will likely be some killing related to the Commodore’s death. Accusations leveled, debts owed, that sort of thing. Could be quite bloody, in fact.’

I thought, Then this will be the final era of killing in my lifetime.

‘It is getting dark,’ Charlie said. ‘We should strike out now, in case they’re planning to beat a retreat. We can come at them the long way around, from the eastern hilltop. It will be fish in a barrel, you watch.’ He began urinating on the fire. I watched the light from the dying flames flickering over his cheeks and chin. He was feeling merry. Charlie was always happiest when he had something to do.

Chapter 48

We took an annular course around Warm and Morris’s camp, crossing the river a half mile up and doubling back, creeping to the summit of the tall hill opposite their settlement. Through the trees we could make out the glowing embers in their fire pit, the kegs of formula sitting up from the waterline, one of them toppled and emptied while the remaining three stood untapped. I could see neither man but their animals remained and I assumed they were either hiding beneath their shelter or else nearby in the woods, armed and waiting for a fight. Morris, I thought, was likely engaged in desperate prayer and repentance; though I scarcely knew the man I decided Warm was probably feeling bolder, more adventuresome, driven by an attitude of rightness and a demand upon himself to see the plan through, come what may. But whatever was going on in their minds, they were nowhere to be seen, and their camp was quiet as the grave.

The dam by comparison was bustling with the inscrutable industry of the nocturnal beavers, numerous, fat, and slick coated in the milky moonlight. They ducked and swam and rose, issuing low groans, communicating some beaver lament or perhaps a sentiment of encouragement; they strode up the shore, pulling twigs and branches back into the water and ferrying these to the dam, atop of which sat the fattest of the bunch, looking over the others as if supervising their efforts. ‘That one there is the boss man,’ I said to Charlie. He had been watching them also, and he nodded.

Presently the portly beaver lumbered free from the dam and moved onto the shore, stepping cautiously at first, as though he did not trust the ground to support his weight, but his trepidation was short-lived, and now he entered into the camp itself, traveling without hesitance or fear, and heading directly for the kegs of formula. Sticking his head into the spent keg, he recoiled at its fumes, then moved on to one of the full and upright barrels. Standing upon his hind legs, he sunk his teeth into the rim, attempting to topple it and, I suppose, drag or roll it into the river. I found the scenario more amusing than anything but Charlie was very focused and anxious about it, for he knew the beaver’s unwelcome attentions would bring about a reaction from Warm and Morris, if they were in fact watching. Sure enough, a moment passed and there came a faint clack-clack sound from the bottom of the valley. Charlie nodded excitedly: ‘There? You heard it?’ The sound was repeated, and then again, and I could make out the blurred black shapes of stones flying through the air and toward the tenacious rodent, who had by this time succeeded in upsetting the keg. We traced the stones’ point of origin to a sheltered grouping of trees and bushes twenty yards back from the camp on our side of the river—Warm and Morris were hidden at the base of the same hill we stood upon, and without a word, Charlie and I began creeping down to catch them from behind. ‘I will take care of Morris,’ he whispered. ‘Keep Warm under your pistol, but you mustn’t shoot him unless it’s an absolute necessity. Give him one in the arm, if need be. He will still be able to work—and he will still be able to talk.’

My very center was beginning to expand, as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless. My flesh and scalp started to ring and tingle and I became someone other than myself, or I became my second self, and this person was highly pleased to be stepping from the murk and into the living world where he might do just as he wished. I felt at once both lust and disgrace and wondered, Why do I relish this reversal to animal? I began exhaling hotly through my nostrils, whereas Charlie was quiet and calm, and he made a gesture that I should also be quiet. He was used to corralling me like this, winding me up and corralling me into battle. Shame, I thought. Shame and blood and degradation.

We were close enough that I could see the spot where Warm and Morris were tucked away, and the indistinct shape of their arms as they tossed their stones. I imagined how their hiding place would look when it was brightly and momentarily lit from our muzzle flashes; each leaf and stone would be sharp and clear and I could envision the men’s frozen expressions, their terrible surprise at having been discovered.

Charlie suddenly clapped his hand on my chest to halt me. His eyes examined my eyes and he said my name searchingly; this removed me from the above-described mentality and returned me to the actual earth. ‘What?’ I said, frustrated, almost, by the interruption. Charlie held up his finger and pointed and said softly, ‘Look.’ I shook my head to awaken my true self and followed the line of his finger.

South of the camp there came a line of men in the dark, and I knew just as soon as I saw their rifle-toting silhouettes it was the blue-eyed brothers from downriver. Thinking back on my brief interaction with the men, I remembered the slightest shift in their stances at my mention of Warm’s wine casks, and now the barrels were just what they moved toward. The beaver was at the waterline with his hard-won prize, but a kick in the belly from the largest brother and he was soaring through the air, landing with a plop in the river. Outraged, he began slapping his tail on the surface of the water, alerting his fellows of this latest danger; they instantly ceased their labors and returned to the safety of the dam interior where they might huddle together without threat of mayhem and brutishness. The boss-man beaver was the last to vacate the scene and his movements were sluggish. I thought he was probably winded after the boot to the stomach—or was he nursing his wounded pride? There was something human about those little beasts, something old and wise. They were cautious, thoughtful animals.

The largest brother rolled the barrel upriver and set it beside its mates before moving to look inside the tent. Finding it empty, he called out a loud ‘Hullo!’ I thought I detected some restrained laughter from Morris and Warm, and I looked quizzically to Charlie. The laughter grew louder, becoming hysteric, and the brothers shifted on the sandbank, looking at one another uneasily.

‘Who is there?’ said the largest brother.

The laughter died away and Warm spoke: ‘We’re here. Who’s there?’

‘We are working a claim downriver,’ the brother answered. Kicking a keg, he said, ‘We want to buy some of this wine from you.’

‘Wine’s not for sale.’

‘We’d give you San Francisco prices.’ He shook his purse to illustrate this, but there was no reply, and the brother looked searchingly into the darkness. ‘Why are you hiding in the shadows like that? Are you afraid of us?’

‘Not particularly,’ said Warm.

‘Then will you come out here and speak with us like men?’

‘We will not.’

‘And you refuse to sell to us?’

‘That is correct.’

‘What if I simply took a barrel?’

Warm paused to think of the answer. At last he said, ‘Then I will send you home less a ball, friend.’ Now I could hear Morris’s crazed laughter—the last sentence had tickled him to the depths of his soul and he submitted wholly, overtaken by his joy. Charlie, smiling, said, ‘Warm and Morris are drunk!’

The brothers came together on the sandbank to speak in private. After their conference of opinion, the largest stepped away from the others, nodding. He said, ‘Sounds like you have had your fair share tonight, but before the sun comes up your spirits will turn low, and your heavy blood will force you into sleep. You can count on us returning then, you men. And we will have your wine, and we will have your lives, also.’ There was no response to this, no laughter or mocking retort, and the brother took a step downriver, his chin in the air, very dramatic and proud. He was having sovereign-type thoughts, it was plain. His words, at any rate, were sufficiently theatrical as to give the jolly duo below us pause; but now I could hear Morris and Warm speaking in a hurried back-and-forth, lowly at first, but soon giving rise to an outright argument at full volume, their words heated and cross. Morris’s pleading voice came clearly as he cried: ‘Hermann, no!’ Just after this was the report of Warm’s baby dragoon, and I saw the largest brother was dropped with a fatal shot to the face.

In a flash then, the other brothers fell to a crouch and began firing in the direction of Morris and Warm; and the drunken pair returned fire, shooting wildly, likely with their heads down and eyes closed. Charlie offered me his swift instruction: ‘Take them both down. It’s all for nothing if they murder Warm.’ From our elevated angle the two remaining brothers proved to be the most elementary game. Less than twenty seconds had passed before they were lifeless in the sand, just beside their leader.

The staggered echoes of our gunshots jumped away over the hills and treetops, and there came from the base of the valley the whooping war cry of Warm. Unaware we had assisted them, he believed they alone had murdered the brothers, and was feeling roisterous about it. Charlie called out to them: ‘That was none of your shooting, Warm, but my brother’s and mine, do you hear me?’ This brought Morris and Warm’s celebration to an abrupt end, and they fell once more to hissing at each other, disagreeing and worrying beneath their shrubs and foliage.

‘I know you can hear me calling you,’ said Charlie.

‘Which one’s that talking?’ asked Warm. ‘The mean one or the fat one? I don’t want to talk to the mean one.’

Charlie looked at me. He gestured that I should speak and I stepped forward to do this. I hoped to appear purposeful and serious in my movements, but I was embarrassed, and he was embarrassed for me. I cleared my throat. ‘Hello!’ I said.

‘That the fat one?’ asked Warm.

‘Eli is my name.’

‘But you are the bigger one? The huskier of the two?’

I thought I could hear Morris laughing.

‘I am husky,’ I said.

‘I don’t mean it unfavorably. I myself have a problem pushing away from the table. Some of us are simply hungrier than others, and what is there to be done about it? Are we meant to starve?’

‘Warm!’ I said. ‘You are drunken, but we need to speak seriously with you. Do you think you can manage it? Or perhaps Morris can?’

He said, ‘What do you wish to discuss?’

‘The same as before. Of our joining forces and working the river as one.’

Charlie reached over and pinched me, hard. ‘What are you doing?’ he whispered.

‘Our position has changed with this new bit of killing,’ I told him.

‘I can’t see that anything has changed. They are still waiting in the dark with pistols to shoot us down.’

‘Let me just see what the reaction is. I believe we can achieve what we wish without spilling any more blood.’

He sat back against a tree, thinking, and chewing his lips. Again he pointed into the darkness that I should speak, and I did: ‘If you can’t see it through to discuss the venture you will force our hand into action, Warm. I mean this in all honesty when I say we do not want to kill either one of you.’

Warm scoffed. ‘Yes, you demand that we should share our profits with you, and if we choose against this, well, you will be obligated to kill us. Do you see how your proposal might be lacking, from our point of view?’

I said, ‘I am proposing we earn a part of the profits. And anyway, if we wanted you dead, do you think we would have cut down those men you see before you?’

Morris said something I could not make out, which Warm translated: ‘Morris says he thinks he got the one on the left.’

‘He did not.’

Warm did not speak to me for a time, and I could not hear him speaking with Morris.

‘Is either of you injured?’ I asked.

‘Morris’s arm was grazed. He is still fit, despite a burning feeling.’

I said, ‘We have medicine that will eliminate that burning. And we have alcohol to clean the wound. We will work the river alongside you, and we will protect you against bandits or intruders. Think of it, Warm. We had you cold earlier today; if we had wanted you dead, you would be dead.’

Another long silence, where I could not make out the slightest murmur from Morris or Warm. Were they searching their very souls for the answer? Would they allow the heretofore bloodthirsty Sisters brothers into their exclusive fold? There arose a gathering noise then, which at first I could not identify, and when I did identify it I questioned if I was truly hearing the sound, it was so incongruous to the present situation: Hermann Warm was whistling. I did not know the tune, but it was the type I had always enjoyed, slow and maudlin, the lyrics to which would have dealt in heartbreak and death. The whistling became louder as Warm quit his hiding place and walked into the open, across the convex spine of the beaver dam and up the sandbank to his camp. He was a very talented whistler, and the song plummeted and soared, quivering in the air and disappearing into the hush of the river. It went on and on, and Charlie, without speaking a word, stood and began walking down the hill. I did not know the plan and neither could he have known the plan. Warm did not know the plan and Morris could not know it. There was no plan. But I found myself likewise hiking down, and with no thought to conceal our approach. Warm was facing us now, looking up the hill in our direction, searching us out, the song on his lips growing ever more tremulous and romantic. His arms were spread, the way an entertainer spreads his arms, as if to envelop an audience.

We walked across the dam and onto the shore. Warm’s tune gave out as we stood face-to-face. He was a wild-looking man, shorter than me by a full foot, and he stank of alcohol and bitter tobacco. His shoulders and arms were thin and he was thin hipped but his belly was great and round and he was not afraid of us in the least, which is to say he was not afraid of death, and I thought I liked him very much; and I could see by the show of whistling, of standing in the clear the way he had that Charlie was also impressed with his boldness and strength of character. Warm offered his hand, first to Charlie and then myself, and we took turns having a shake and solidifying our alliance. After this there was a gap in time where no one knew quite what to say or do. Morris, not yet prepared to socialize, had stayed behind in the bushes with the whiskey.

Chapter 49

We stoked the fire and sat to discuss our partnership. Charlie was for dumping a barrelful of the formula that night but Warm demurred, saying he and Morris were drunk and exhausted besides. Morris, I should say, eventually emerged from his hiding place, gripping his arm in discomfort but hoping to appear nonchalant or cavalier about it. You could see he was troubled by our joining up with them; I watched Charlie watching him and was concerned about what my brother might say or do to the man. It was a relief when he greeted Morris without malevolence, extending his hand and saying he hoped they would let bygones be bygones. Morris shook Charlie’s hand reflexively; looking at me, he shrugged, and passed over a long silver flask. His mustache was frayed at its ends and his eyes were red and swollen and he said, ‘I’m tired, Hermann.’ Warm regarded him with fondness. ‘It has been a long one, has it not, my friend? Well, why don’t you go sleep it off. We’ll all have a rest and regroup as a quartet in the morning.’ Morris said no more, but retired to his tent. I had a drink of whiskey and handed the flask to Charlie. He took a drink and passed it to Warm. Warm took a short sip and screwed the top on tight, hiding the flask away in his coat pocket as if to say: That is enough of that. He licked his palm to smooth his hair and tugged on his lapels to straighten them. He was working through a fog, making an attempt at seriousness.

It was decided my brother and I would keep half of whatever we culled from the river, and that the remainder would go to what Warm called the Company.

‘The Company being you and Morris,’ Charlie said.

‘Yes, but it’s not as though the profits will be spent at the saloon. They will be used to finance future excursions, similar to this one, though more ambitious, and so more costly. Anyway, if this goes as I believe it might, the Company will grow quickly, with several operations under way simultaneously, and there will be opportunities to become further involved should one prove himself trustworthy. As for now, why don’t we wait and see if you and your brother can make it through this modest expedition without slitting my and Morris’s throats, eh?’

Fair enough, I thought. Warm began itching his ankles and shins and I asked him, ‘Did you pull very much from the river last night?’

He said, ‘We were so tickled with the spectacle that a good amount of time was wasted simply staring and wading and laughing and congratulating each other, when we should have been working. But in the quarter hour we labored before the gold ceased its glowing we removed what would have taken us a month if we had panned it. The formula works, all right. It works just as well as I had hoped or better.’ Looking over his shoulder at the river, Warm was contented to be thinking of his successes, and I felt a powerful envy as I watched him. He was reaping the benefits, both monetary and spiritual, of his hard labors and intelligence, and it made me think of my own path, which by comparison was so much the more thoughtless and heartless one. Charlie was also studying Warm, though his expression read less of admiration than enigmatic curiosity. Warm I do not think noticed our attentions to his person, and continued with his story: ‘It was just the prettiest thing I have ever seen, gentlemen. Hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of gold, each of them lit up, bright as a candle flame. I will call it the most pleasing work I’ve taken part in, stepping up and back in the water and sand, picking out the golden stones and plunking them into the bucket.’ His eyes were sharp and focused at the memory; a shiver ran through me as I gazed at the river and imagined it as he had described. ‘Twenty-four hours,’ he said, ‘then you will see for yourselves.’

Once again he began scratching his shins, more fiercely than before; I noticed in the firelight the coloring of his skin had darkened, and that the flesh was agitated and raw. He nodded his head at my curious expression and told me, ‘Something I did not account for, it’s true. I knew the formula to be caustic, but I had assumed it would do no harm once diluted in the river. In the future we should equip ourselves with a kind of covering for our feet and ankles.’ Morris called to him from the tent and Warm excused himself; when he returned he wore a grim face and confided in us that Morris was having some difficulty acclimating himself to life out of doors. ‘God knows I am indebted to him, but you should have seen his face when I forced him to leave his powders and scents in San Francisco. How he made it to California from Oregon City carrying all those bottles and boxes is beyond me.’

‘How is his arm?’ I asked.

‘The bullet only nicked him, and he is in no danger that I can see, but morale-wise he is doing poorly. Your both being here is weighing on his mind, and his legs are bothering him, more than mine, even. But you said something about medicine? It would put him at ease, I think, your making good on the offer of help.’

Charlie sent me back to our camp to collect our effects while he and Warm hammered out the final details of the consortium. When I returned with Nimble, weighed down with both our saddles and baggage, Charlie had dragged the three dead brothers nearer the fire, which I understood at once but which Warm, standing by, could not fathom. ‘Would it not be best to haul them into the forest?’ he said. ‘I should not like to look at their faces in the morning.’

‘The sun will never shine upon them,’ Charlie answered, and he pulled one of the men directly over top of the flames.

‘What are you doing?’ said Warm.

‘How are you fixed for lamp oil?’

Now Warm understood. He fetched his supply of oil, and I in turn gave him the alcohol and numbing medicine. He left to tend to Morris while I assisted Charlie in disposing of the corpses. We coated them head to foot in the oil and they were soon all three of them burning exultantly, their bodies stacked and blackened at the base of the blaze and I thought, So much for the calmer life. Warm’s face appeared at the entrance of the tent to watch the gruesome spectacle. He looked sad. After a time he said, to no one, ‘I have had enough of this day, today.’ His head disappeared, and I was alone once more with my brother.

Watching him roll out his blankets, I wished to ask him what was in his heart just then, for I wanted so badly to trust him, that he had at last made a moral decision, but I could not think of the correct words to say, and I was fearful of what the answer might be, and besides that I was spent, and just as soon as I laid my head on the ground I dropped into the most impenetrable kind of dreamless, leaden sleep.

Chapter 50

When I awoke, the sun was upon my face, the river sound was in my ears, and Charlie was not beside me. Warm stood stiffly over the bonfire ash pile, a long stick in his hand, half raised as though set to strike. He pointed out the gray-black skull of one of the dead brothers and said, ‘See it? Now, watch.’ He tapped the top of the skull and the entire visage collapsed to dust. ‘There is your civilized man’s last reward.’ His words had an embittered edge to them, so that I was moved to ask, ‘You are not the God-fearing sort, Warm?’

‘I am not. And I hope you aren’t, either.’

‘I don’t know if I am.’

‘You are afraid of hell. But that’s all religion is, really. Fear of a place we’d rather not be, and where there’s no such a thing as suicide to steal us away.’

I thought, Why did I bring up God so soon after waking? Warm returned his attentions to the ash pile. ‘I suppose the brain cooks down to nothing?’ he mused. ‘The heat converts it to water, which then evaporates. Just a slip of smoke and away floats the precious organ onto the breeze.’

‘Where is Charlie?’

‘He and Morris went to have a swim.’ Warm found another skull and likewise tapped and collapsed it.

‘They went together?’ I asked.

Looking upriver, he said, ‘Morris was complaining about his legs and your brother said he thought a dip might soothe the burning.’

‘How long ago did they leave?’

‘Half an hour.’ Warm shrugged.

‘Will you take me to them?’

He said he would. He was not alarmed and I did not wish to alarm him but I tried to hurry him along as much as possible, acting as though I were overheated and ready for a swim myself. Warm was not a man who liked to rush, however; in fact he appeared to insist upon stopping and dissecting most every little thing. Pulling on his boots, he wondered, ‘What do you imagine happened to the first man who wrapped his bare feet in leaves or leather, to protect himself? Likely he was pushed from the tribe, emasculated.’ He laughed. ‘He was probably showered with stones and killed!’ I had nothing to add to this, but Warm did not need any reply from me, and he continued his speech as we set off upriver: ‘Of course in those times people’s feet were covered in the very toughest calluses, so the desire for footwear was likely more for appearance than comfort or necessity, at least in the warmer climates.’ He pointed out an eagle flying nearby; when the bird swung down and collected a heavy fish from the river, Warm applauded.

His legs were troubling him and I offered my arm, which he took, with thanks. The sand was soft and deep and he asked me once and then again if we might rest, and though I was loath to hesitate anymore than was necessary, I was also hesitant to explain my reasons for hurrying. But Warm deduced it; he chuckled and asked me, ‘You do not trust your brother completely, do you?’ In the context of our tentative business alliance, and because Charlie was currently alone with Warm’s weakened comrade, here was a serious question, and yet his expression spoke only of amusement, as though we were engaging in the lightest type of town gossip.

‘He is a difficult one to pin down,’ came my sideways answer.

‘Morris, I think, actually despised your brother before your helping us last night. And yet this morning they were walking arm in arm. What do you make of it?’

‘I don’t know what to say, other than it is out of character for him.’

‘You do not think his assistance is wholesome?’

‘I am surprised to hear it, is all.’

Warm paused to scratch at his shins, and I could see his skin had become considerably darker, with blisters beginning to bloom upward toward the kneecap. His scratching grew more furious, so that he fairly shredded his own flesh with his fingernails; I believe he was frustrated about the formula acting as an irritant, and thus marring the beauty of his plans. At last he fell to slapping his legs to quiet the maddening itch, and this seemed to bring him some relief. Straightening his pant legs, he asked me, ‘But you don’t really think Charlie would kill old Morris, do you?’

‘I do not know. I hope not.’ He put his arm on mine and we continued upstream. I said, ‘I’ll admit it feels unusual to speak this way with you.’

He shook his head. ‘Best to keep it out in the open, as far as I’m concerned. And isn’t it already? And really, what can Morris and I do about it? We would rather you and your brother not kill us, but we’re at your mercy more or less, aren’t we?’

‘It’s quite a group you’ve assembled, Warm.’

Gravely, he said, ‘Dodgy, isn’t it. A dandy and two infamous murderers.’

I began to laugh, and Warm asked me what was funny. ‘You, and your purple legs and hands. Morris and my brother, and the men piled high in the fire. My dead horse tumbling down a hill.’

Warm appreciated the sentiment, and stood awhile to beam at me. ‘Touch of the poet in you, Eli.’ He said he would like to ask me something personal, and I granted him permission, and here is what he wished to know: ‘It is a question I put to Morris some time ago, but now I am wondering the very same thing about you, which is how you came to work for a man like the Commodore.’

I said, ‘It’s a long story. But basically, my brother knew violence from a young age, thanks to our father, who was a bad man. This brought about many problems for Charlie, one of these being that whenever he was insulted he could never engage in your average fight with fists or even knives, but had to see each episode through to death. Well, you kill a man, then his friend or brother or father comes around, and it starts all over again. So it was that Charlie sometimes found himself outnumbered, which was where I came in. I was young, but my temper was always high, and the thought of someone causing harm to my older brother—up until then he had been a very good and protective brother—was enough to make me partway insane. As his reputation grew, so did the number of his opponents, and so did his need for assistance, and in time it was understood that to come up against one of us was to do battle with both. It turns out, and I don’t know why this is, and have at times wished it were not so, but yes—we had or have an aptitude for killing. Because of this, we were approached by the Commodore, who offered us positions in his firm. At first this was more muscle work—debt collection, that type of thing—than outright murder. But as he took us further into his confidence, and as the wage increased, it soon devolved to it.’ Warm was listening intently to the story, and his face was so serious I could not help but laugh. I said, ‘Your expression tells me your opinion of my profession, Warm. I am inclined to agree with you. At any rate, and just as I was saying to Charlie, this job is my last.’

Warm ceased walking, and turned to watch me with a lost, fearful look on his face. I asked him what was the matter and he said, ‘I believe you meant to say the job before was your last. For you do not plan to see this one through, isn’t that the case?’

We had just cleared a curve in the river; looking up, I saw Charlie, naked, stalking from the water to his clothing on the shore. Morris lay floating just behind him, belly up, his body still. When Charlie turned toward us, his face broke into a smile, and he waved. Now I saw Morris was sitting up, unmolested, and he too waved and called to us. My heart was pounding hard; it felt as though the blood was draining right out of it. Returning my attentions to Warm, I answered him, ‘It was only a mix-up of words, Hermann, and we are through working for the man. I give you my word on it.’

Warm stood before me then, looking into me; his manner conveyed several things at once: Sturdiness, wariness, fatigue, but also an energy or glow—something like the center of a low flame. Is this what they call charisma? I do not know, exactly, except to say Warm was more there than the average man.

‘I believe you,’ he said.

We made our way to the others, with Morris calling from the water, ‘Hermann! You must come in! It really is a great help.’ His voice was high pitched, and he was outside of himself, removed from his personal constraint of rigidness and seriousness, and very much pleased to be. ‘The gay little baby,’ Warm commented, dropping onto his backside in the sand. Squinting in the sunlight he looked up and asked, ‘Help me with my boots, Eli, please?’

Chapter 51

In the evening I found myself resting before the fire with Warm, waiting for the sky to darken that we might use the gold-finding formula most effectively. To pass the time, he encouraged me to speak of my life, to recount for him my many dangerous adventures, only I had no wish to do this, and in fact wanted to forget about myself for a moment; I turned the questions back upon him, and he was all the more forthcoming than I. Warm enjoyed speaking of himself, though not in a proud or egotistical way. I think he merely recognized the tale as an uncommon one, and so was pleased to share it. As such, his life story was revealed to me in a single sitting.

He was born in 1815 in Westford, Massachusetts. His mother was fifteen years old and ran off after giving birth, just as soon as she was strong enough to carry herself away. She left Warm to the care of his father, Hans, a German immigrant, a watchmaker and inventor. ‘A great thinker, a tireless puzzler and problem solver. He could never crack his own private problems, however, and there was no shortage of these. He was . . . difficult to be around. Let me just say that Father had some unnatural habits.’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘Ugly things. A specific area of deviancy. It is too unpleasant to speak of. The visual would put you off your feed. Best to move along.’

‘I understand.’

‘No, you don’t, and be glad of that. But here was the reason he left Germany, and from what I gather he left quickly, under cover of night, taking a near-total financial loss in transit. He hated America on sight and continued to hate it with all his being until his death. I remember him looking out at that beautiful autumnal Massachusetts landscape and spitting on the ground, saying, “The sun and moon shame themselves by shining their lights upon it!” Berlin was a great metropolis and playground for him, you see. He felt relegated and undermined here, and that his new audience was not as respectful as the one he knew back home.’

‘What did he invent?’

‘He made small, practical improvements on existing inventions. A pocket watch with a compass built into its face, for example; another that he designed exclusively for ladies—a smaller model cast in a teardrop shape and painted in pastel colors. He was well paid and well liked before scandal ruined him, and he was forced to expatriate. When he arrived in America, dressed strangely and speaking almost no English, he found himself unwanted by even the lowliest watch companies, whom he believed were far beneath him; as he fell into poverty his mind grew darker, when it was already shades darker than your average man. Increasingly his inventions became diabolical, nonsensical. At last he focused his every energy on the refinement of torture and killing devices. The guillotine, he said, was the mechanical embodiment of man’s underachievement and aesthetic sloth. He updated it so that instead of simply removing a person’s head, the body would be cut into numberless tidy cubes. He named the great sheet of crisscrossing silver blades Die Beweiskraft Bettdecke—The Conclusive Blanket. He invented a gun with five barrels that fired simultaneously and covered three hundred degrees in one blast. A hail of bullets, with a slim part, or what he called Das Dreieck des Wohlstands—The Triangle of Prosperity—inside of which stood the triggerman himself.’

‘That’s not a bad idea, actually.’

‘Unless you are fighting five men at once who happen to be standing directly in front of each barrel, it is a terrible idea.’

‘It shows imagination.’

‘It shows a complete disregard for safety and practicality.’

‘Anyway, it’s interesting.’

‘That I will not deny, though at the time—I was thirteen years old—his work brought me little in the way of amusement. Actually, his inventions filled me with horror; I could not shake the notion he wanted to try them out on me, and even now I dare say this was not mere paranoia on my part. So I was not entirely unhappy when he packed a bag and left one spring morning, without any instruction or good-bye—not so much as a pat on the head from the old man. He later committed suicide, with an ax, in Boston.’

‘An ax? How is that possible?’

‘I don’t know. But here was what the letter said: Woefully sorry to report your Hans Warm killed self with ax on 15th May. Possessions forthcoming.’

‘Perhaps he was murdered.’

‘No, I don’t think so. If there was ever anyone who could find a way to kill himself with an ax, it was Father. They never did forward his things. I have often wondered what it was he held on to, there at the end.’

‘And after he left you, then what happened?’

‘I was alone for two weeks in our cabin when my mother arrived, standing in the doorway, twenty-eight years old, pretty as a picture. She had heard I’d been abandoned and came to fetch me back to Worcester, where she had been living all the while. She was awfully sorry to have left me, she said, but she had been deathly afraid of my father, who would drink too much and menace her with knives and forks and things. It was very much a forced or one-sided romance, was my understanding. She could not discuss their time together without revulsion. But that was past, and we were the both of us well pleased to be reunited. The whole first month in Worcester she simply held me and cried. This was the sum total of our relationship at the beginning. I wondered if it would ever stop.’

‘She sounds like a kind woman.’

‘Indeed she was. There were five years of blissful relations where our life was a kind of perfection. She had been given a legacy by her family in New York, and so I always had enough to eat, and my clothes were clean, and she encouraged me in my pursuit of knowledge, for even at that tender age, curiosity in most everything was strong in me, from mechanical engineering to botany to chemistry—yes, clearly that! Unfortunately this contented existence was not to last, for with my transformation to manhood it became clear to her that I was my father’s son, both in looks and temperament. I became obsessive with my studies, hardly ever leaving my room. When she tried to guide me toward healthier pastimes I was consumed by an anger that frightened the both of us. I took to drinking, not too terribly much at the start, but enough that I would become abusive and belittling, just as my father had. Having been through all this before, my mother understandably found my behavior repellent, and she removed her affections in wretched stages until there was nothing left between us, nothing but for me to go, which is what I did, taking my small sack of money and heading to St. Louis, or should I say my sack ran out in St. Louis, which forced me to cease traveling. It was wintertime, and I feared I would perish from cold or sadness or both. I sold my horse and married a fat woman I did not love, or even like, named Eunice.’

‘Why would you marry someone you didn’t like?’

‘She had an enormous potbellied stove in her cabin that emanated heat like the coals of hell. And by the looks of her she held a stockpile of food that might feed the both of us through to the spring. You’re smiling, but I assure you these were my lone motivations: Warmth and nourishment. I so longed for any manner of comfort, I would have married an alligator if only it would share its bed. And I might as well have married an alligator, for all the kindness Eunice showed me. She had no grace or charm whatsoever. She had noncharm, or anticharm. A bottomless well of antagonism and hostility. And she was terrifically ugly. And she smelled like rotten leaves. A brute, to put it briefly. When the money from my horse sale ran out, and when she understood I had no plans to copulate with her, she pushed me from the bed and onto the floor, where the heat from the stove burned my topside, while the draft coming up through the boards froze my bottom. Also, my hopes for a bountiful dinner table were soon dashed. Eunice was as protective as a mama bear about her biscuits. She gave me the occasional bowl of watery stew, so let’s say she wasn’t all bad, but the good was there in such measly quantities you had to keep a sharp watch lest you miss it entirely. But as I said, it was miserably cold, and I had made the decision to dig in my heels and pass the winter in that cabin, one way or the other. After the weather broke I would rob her and run away into the sunshine—I would have my last laugh. She recognized my plan, however, and got me one better before I could see it through. I came home from the saloon and found a large and angry-looking man sitting at the dinner table. He had a plateful of biscuits before him. I understood right away. I wished them good luck and left.’

‘That was sporting.’

‘I returned an hour later and tried to set the cabin alight. The man caught me huddled over my matchbox and kicked me so hard in the backside it lifted me from the earth. Eunice saw it all from the window. That was the only time I saw her laugh. She laughed a long time, too. Anyway, I am embarrassed to say it, but after this hurtful episode I became disenchanted, and turned for a time to common thievery. I could not get my mind around my misfortune, was the thing. Only months earlier I was alone with my books, clean and sheltered and well fed, happy as could be. And now, through no fault of my own, I found myself sneaking into barns at night and burrowing under manure-matted hay so as not to freeze to death. I said to myself, Hermann, the world has raised up its fist and struck you down! I resolved to strike back.’

‘What did you steal?’

‘At the start I was after the bare necessities. A loaf of bread here, a blanket there, a pair of wool socks—small things that no man should be denied. But with every passing crime I became more stealthy and cocksure and also greedy; after a time I began to take away anything I could get my hands on, just for the malicious pleasure I derived from it. I stole items I could never conceivably use. A pair of women’s boots. A crib. At one point I found myself running from an abattoir with a severed cow’s head in my arms. What for? What functional purpose might it serve? When it became too heavy I dropped the thing into a river. It bobbed along, then caromed off a rock and sank out of sight. Stealing became like a sickness. I think I saw it as a way to extract revenge against everyone who was not shivering and famished and alone. It was around this point my drinking began to take hold of me, body and spirit. You talk about your slippery roads.’

‘My father was a drinker. And Charlie is, also.’

‘It is something that plagues me still, and perhaps will always plague me. Of course it would be best to cork the bottle forever. I have recognized the problem. I know it doesn’t agree with me. Why not stop? Why not put an end to it? No, that would make too much sense. That would be entirely too reasonable. Oh, it’s a slippery road, all right, make no mistake about that. Well, days and months passed me by and I became dirtier and more depraved all the while, inside and out. You will meet some down-on-their-luck types who take pride in their pared and scrubbed nails, men who will boast of their once-per-week baths, financial hardships be damned. They attend church services regularly and sit patiently in the pews, awaiting their change in fate without a trace of bitterness, beards combed down just so. Let me say that I was not one of these. In fact I was the far opposite. I became increasingly drawn to filth. More and more I desired to lay and grovel in it, to actually live within in. My teeth fell out, and this pleased me. My hair dropped away in patches and I was glad. I was the raving and maniacal village idiot, in short, only the village was not a humble, thatched-roof township, but the United States of America. Finally I was seized by an unshakable preoccupation, namely the belief that I was actually composed of human waste.’

‘What?’

‘A living mold of waste, was my notion. Excrement. My bones were hardened excrement. My blood—was liquid excrement. Do not ask me to elucidate. It is something I will never be able to explain. I was suffering, if I’m not mistaken, from scurvy, which added together with the drinking and mental agitation brought about this queer idea.’

‘Living waste matter.’

‘I delighted in the thought of it. My favorite pastime was to push through a crowd, touching and groping the bare arms of unescorted women. The sight of my own grime on their pale wrists and hands was just as satisfying a thing as I could think of.’

‘I don’t suppose you were very popular.’

‘I was a popular point of discussion. Socially, though? No, I was not well thought of. But then I rarely stayed in one place long enough to become more than an alleyway myth. Mania or no, I was not a fool, and I knew enough that I should strike and move on at once, before any violence came against me. I would steal a horse and head for the next town, only to start my contamination campaign all over again. My days were ordure and ugliness and the blackest kind of sin, and I was only half living, just barely hanging on, waiting and hoping, I think, for death. And then one morning I woke up and found myself in a most curious place, and would you care to guess where that was? Don’t say jail.’

‘I was going to say it.’

‘Let me just tell you then. I awoke with the king mother of all whiskey headaches on a cot in militia barracks. I was washed and my beard had been shaved clean. My hair had been cut back and I wore a soldier’s uniform. The reveille was screaming in my ears, and I thought I would die, literally, of fright and confusion. Then a bright-faced soldier came by and gripped me by the arm. “Wake up, Hermann!” he said. “You miss roll call one more time you’ll wind up in the stockade!” ’

‘What in the world had happened?’

‘That was precisely what I wanted to know. But put yourself in my position. How would you find the answer to this?’

‘I suppose I would ask someone.’

Warm affected a serious posture and voice: ‘Pardon me, my good man, but would you mind telling me how it is I came to join the militia? It is only a slight detail, but I just can’t seem to put my finger on it.’

‘It would be an awkward way to start a conversation,’ I admitted. ‘But what else was there to do? You could not simply go along with it.’

‘But that is exactly what I did do. Fell right in line, as a matter of fact. You must understand, Eli, that I was disconcerted in the extreme. As a drunkard, I was used to losing an hour or two here and there, or even an entire evening. But how much time had passed for me to join the militia and establish relationships with the other soldiers, all of whom appeared to know me well? How could I not recall so drastic a change? I decided to keep my head down and go with the crowd until I could figure things out.’

‘And did you ever?’

‘It was all the doing of the bright-faced soldier, named Jeremiah. Every once in a while, out of boredom, he liked to go into town and find the very lowest sort of alcohol-muddled scallywag. He would fill him with drink, extract personal information, and then, once the man was totally incapacitated, drag him back to the barracks, outfit him in a military uniform, and put him to bed. This is what happened to me.’

‘Were you very angry when you understood you’d been tricked?’

‘Not particularly, because by the time I found out, I was glad to be there. Life in the militia brought about many positive changes in my life. I was forced to bathe regularly, which I did not like at the start, but I endured, and this return to the habits of cleanliness successfully killed my bedeviling excrement obsession. I was fed, and the cots were comfortable, the barracks warm enough, and there was usually at least a little something to drink at night. We played cards, sang songs. A sturdy group of men, those soldiers. A bunch of orphans, really, alone in the world, passing time together, with nothing much to do. In this manner, six or seven uneventful months rolled by, and I was beginning to wonder how I might get out of there when I had the good fortune to befriend a lieutenant colonel named Briggs. If I had not come to know him, then you and I would not presently be sitting about, waiting for the river’s riches.’

‘What happened?’

‘I will tell you. I was passing by his quarters one evening when I noticed his door, which usually was not only closed but bolted shut, was now ajar. Like many of the other soldiers, I had developed a curiosity about him, because while your typical officer was very much the taskmaster and bellower, Briggs was shy and retiring, a slight, gray-haired man with a faraway gaze, forever locked in the privacy of his room doing God only knew what. Mysteries are scarce in the militia; I found I could not help but investigate. I opened the door and peered in. Tell me then, Eli, what do you think I saw?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Take a stab.’

‘I really don’t know, Hermann.’

‘Not much for guessing, eh? All right, I’ll just say it. I saw our man Briggs, standing alone, deep in thought, and he was wearing a crisp cotton smock. On the table before him were burners and beakers and all manner of laboratory paraphernalia. Scattered around his room were numberless bulky, heady tomes.’

‘He was a chemist?’

‘A hobby chemist, and not a very keen one, I came to learn. But the sight of his effects took hold of me. Without hardly knowing what I was doing I entered fully into his quarters and stood before the equipment, staring over it as if hypnotized. By this time Briggs had noticed my gawking person; he blushed and cursed me, damning my impertinence and ordering me from the room. I begged his pardon but he would not hear me, and he pushed me out the door. That night I found I could not sleep. The nearness to the books and equipment reawakened my hunger for study and learning; it came over me like a fever, and at last I rose from my cot and wrote Briggs a letter by candlelight, explaining about my past and my father’s, and essentially demanding that he take me on as his assistant. I slid the missive under his door and he called for me the next morning. He was wary, but once he understood my seriousness and the depth of my knowledge we struck a bargain, which was that I would assist him in his experiments, and as payment for this he would allow me access to his effects and books, and I should be allowed a certain amount of time to work on my own in his room. I gladly quit my usual nights of cards and bourbon and dirty stories and set up what was, at least for militia barracks, a fairly ambitious laboratory. Guided then, by my own sense of intuition, and also by the books Briggs happened to have in his library, I was led to the realm of Light.’

Warm paused to pour himself a cup of coffee. He offered me a cup and I declined. He took a small drink and returned to his story.

‘The years that had passed me by since I last studied, how many had they been? And all that time I did little else but abuse and mistreat myself. I had had no sustenance to speak of, neither physical nor mental, and as I sat and cracked a book that very first evening I was visited by a concern that my brain might not recognize words the way it had in the past. The brain is a muscle, after all, and I would have to retrain it, wouldn’t you think? Eh? Well, I had a nice surprise then, which was that my mind, unbeknownst to me, had all the while been improving itself of its own accord, waiting for the day I might dust it off and use it again. Now that day had arrived and my brain, as though worried I might only shelf it once more, attacked every page of every book with a magnificent strength and vitality. It was all I could do to keep up, but thankfully I did, and received my reward some months later when the idea for the gold-finding formula came to me, or should I say hit me, for it was just as though I were knocked on the chest with a heavy stone—I actually fell back in my chair. Poor Briggs didn’t know what was wrong with me. At first I couldn’t speak. Then I jumped for the ink and paper and would not be moved for an hour.’

‘What did he think of the idea?’

‘That I do not know, for I never told him—and he never forgave me for not telling him. It was not that I mistrusted him personally, but that I didn’t think any man could keep this information to himself. It was simply too much weight to carry. Of course, this offended him terrifically, and he banished me back to the barracks, where I tried for a time to continue my work. When this proved impossible—the men were fond of hiding or otherwise defacing my notes—I began to plan my escape by desertion. But when one of my bunkmates beat me to it, and when he was apprehended and shot the selfsame day he struck out, then the thought of desertion lost its appeal for me. At last I was beginning to feel desperate, fearful my grand idea would vanish into thin air, and I turned to Jeremiah, the man responsible for my being there. I told him, “Jeremiah, I want to quit this place. Tell me, please, what should I do about it?” He put his hands on my shoulders and said, “If you want to leave here then you should turn and walk away. Because, Hermann, you are not actually in the militia.” I had never formally joined, it turns out, never signed my name to anything. That night they threw me a party. I left in the morning and set up a modest laboratory nearby. It took me near a year of trial and error before I had the desired results. First I managed to illuminate the gold, but only for a brief instant. When I figured out a way to sustain the glow, something in the formula turned the gold gray. At one point I accidentally burned my shack halfway to the ground. It was not easy, is what I am saying. When at last I found myself pleased with the effects, this coincided with the news of the gold strike in California and I came west on the Oregon Trail. This spit me out in Oregon City and led me to your man the Commodore. From there, I believe, you know the story.’

‘More or less.’

Warm scratched his hands and legs. Gazing upward, he spoke over his shoulder: ‘What do you think, Morris? Sky dark enough to suit you?’

Morris called back, ‘Give us another minute, Hermann. The wretch has painted himself into a corner, and I’m closing in for the kill.’

‘We will see about it,’ said Charlie.

They were playing cards in the tent.

Chapter 52

Four men all at once removing their pants beside a river in the nighttime. The fire was tall behind us and we had had three drinks of whiskey apiece, this being just the proper amount for the task at hand, we decided—enough to offset the coldness of the water, but not so much that we would not be able to focus on the work, and later on, to remember it. The lead beaver was sitting lumpily atop the dam, scrutinizing us, and scratching himself with his hind legs like a dog; the formula had wreaked its havoc upon his flesh, also. But where were his comrades? It seemed they were hiding out or otherwise resting. When my feet touched the water I began nervously to laugh but suppressed this, feeling that outright gladness was not correct, or was disrespectful; to what or whom, I cannot say, but I had the impression we were all of us holding our breath, much in the same way, and for the same vague reasons.

One of the kegs had been rolled to the shore, its top opened, ready to be poured. I caught a lungful of the formula’s scent and my chest flashed with an instant, burning heat. Morris was standing shy of the river, watching the water with a look of dread.

‘How about your legs, Morris?’ I asked.

Regarding his shins, he shook his head. ‘Not good’ was his answer.

Warm said, ‘I put a pot of water on the fire, and laid out some scrub soap for us to wash ourselves just after. Morris and I failed to think of this last time, hence our present troubles.’ Turning to Morris, he said, ‘Can you stand another night of it?’

‘Let’s get it over with,’ Morris muttered. His legs were rashed to the thigh now, his skin rubbed raw and covered over in fat blisters, these filled with a brownish liquid and drooping slightly under their own weight. He was having trouble supporting himself upright, and as he hobbled closer to the water’s edge I wondered, Why are we putting him through this? ‘Morris,’ I said, ‘I think you should not do any work tonight.’

‘And forfeit the winnings to you all?’ he scoffed, but his tone, the weakness in his throat, betrayed any good humor. He was frightened, and Warm was quick to second my thought. ‘Eli is quite right. Why not sit back and rest, for now. You will still receive a share of whatever I pull.’

‘And from me, also,’ I added.

Warm and I looked to Charlie. His charity was slower in coming, but eventually he, too, nodded and said, ‘Me, also, Morris.’

‘There, you see?’ said Warm.

Morris hesitated. His pride had been awakened and he did not want to quit. ‘What if I were to pull only from the shallows?’

‘It’s good of you to suggest it,’ Warm said, ‘but that might disable you permanently. Best to sit back now, and let us do the work. You can make up for it next time around, eh? What do you say?’ Morris did not answer, but stood apart from us, looking morosely at the sand. Brightening, Warm said, ‘Last time, the glowing was concentrated on this side of the river where we poured the formula. But if you were to agitate the waters, with a tree branch, say, from atop the beaver dam, you would likely increase the field of illumination.’

Morris was pleased with the idea, and we found a long branch for him to work with. Warm led him by the arm and installed him at the center of the dam, shooing the beaver back into the water before continuing on his own to the farther shore, which would be his area of focus. Now he called for Charlie and me to dump the first keg into the waters, warning us not to let any of the formula rest upon our flesh. ‘You can see that it’s painful enough watered down; the raw liquid itself might burn a hole clean through you.’ He pointed out the second keg, positioned at the shoreline, twenty yards up river. ‘As soon as the first is emptied, dash up and empty the other.’

‘What of the third keg?’ asked Charlie. ‘Would it not be best to dump them all and be done with it?’

‘We are already pushing our luck with two,’ answered Warm.

‘If we were to finish tonight we could leave in the morning and get Morris to a doctor.’

‘We would all of us need doctors. Keep focused, Charlie, please. After you two empty the second barrel we’ll let Morris mix it all. Once you see the glow, take up your buckets and get to work, quickly!’

Charlie and I squatted before the keg to lift it. My hands were shaking terribly, I was so nervous all of a sudden; my shoulders twitched and quivered and I thought, I have not felt this way since I lay down with a woman for the very first time. And it was just the same type of divine excitability: I was tortured with giddiness in anticipation of that river coming to life. Charlie noticed my shivering and ducking and asked me, ‘All right?’ I said I thought I was. I gripped the bottom lip of the keg with my fingers, digging into the hard-packed sand. We counted three and slowly hefted the heavy barrel into the air and began taking our cautious, crabwise steps, easing into the running river. The shock from the cold made Charlie hiss, and then laugh, which made me laugh, and we ceased moving for a moment that we might both laugh together. The moon and bright stars hung above our heads. The formula swayed and rolled in the barrel. Its surface was black and silver, and the river was black and silver. We tilted the keg and the dense liquid dropped from the lip. I could not remember ever feeling quite so bold.

From the moment we started pouring we took small backward steps in the direction of the sandy bank. The keg swirled its fumes and vapors and once more I caught the scent in my nose and lungs; I retched and nearly vomited, it was so strong and overpowering. The heat attacked my eyes and they were instantly awash in tears.

Once we were clear of the water we tossed the barrel and dashed upriver for the second. We hefted and dumped this and I stood back on the sand to wait. On the far shore, Warm instructed Morris to begin his stirring. When the frail man could not keep a sufficiently brisk pace, Warm foraged a branch for himself and agitated the waters by slapping the surface over and over, just as quickly and violently as he was able. I heard a noise at my back and turned to find Charlie cracking open the third barrel with a hatchet.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘We will dump them all,’ he said, grunting as he wrenched back the top of the keg.

Warm took notice and shouted across the river: ‘Leave off with that!’

‘We will dump them all and be done with it!’ said Charlie.

‘Leave off!’ Warm cried. ‘Eli, stop him!’

I came closer but Charlie was already lifting the keg on his own. He took several weighted steps before misplacing his balance and stumbling; the thick fluid crested the lip and ran down the front of the barrel, covering and coating his right hand over the knuckles. This began in a matter of seconds to attack his flesh and he dropped the keg at the waterline, where the current pulled the formula out and to the dam.

Charlie was bent over in pain, his jaw clenched and locked, and I took up his wrist to study his injury. There were blooming blisters across the knuckles and upward to the wrist—I could actually see the blisters rising and falling, as though they were breathing, the way a bullfrog takes air into its throat. He was not frightened, but angry, his nostrils flaring like a bull’s, with spit running down his chin in a long, elastic ribbon. His eyes, I thought, were magnificent; their reflection in the firelight revealed the very embodiment of defiance, of clarified hatred. I took up the heated water from the fire and doused his hand to rinse it, afterward fetching a shirt to wrap him. Warm did not know what we were doing, or that Charlie had had an accident. ‘Hurry, you men!’ he called. ‘Can’t you see? Hurry up over there!’

‘Can you hold a bucket with it?’ I asked Charlie.

He attempted to close his hand and his forehead folded in sheer pain. The tips of his fingers, sticking from the dressing, were already bloating and it occurred to me this was his shooting hand—something I imagine he had thought of the moment the formula had been spilled. ‘I can’t close it,’ he said.

‘But can you still work?’

He said he believed he could and I fetched a bucket, sliding the handle past his hand and onto his forearm. He nodded, and now I took up a bucket for myself, and we turned to face the river.

In the time we had been distracted with Charlie’s injury the formula had taken hold, its glow so bright I had to shield my eyes. The river bottom was illuminated completely, so that every pebble and mossy rock was visible. The flakes and fragments of gold, which moments earlier were cold and mute, were now points of the purest yellow-and-orange light, and just as distinct as the stars in the sky. Warm was working away, his hand dipping into the river, his head darting up and back in search of the larger pieces. He was methodical about it, working intelligently, efficiently, but his face and eyes, lit from the river glow, revealed the highest, most supreme type of joy. Morris had exhausted himself and could no longer stir; he planted his long stick into the dam and leaned against it, gazing over the waters with an expression of calm, almost narcotic satisfaction. I looked at Charlie. His face had softened, gone slack, his pain and anger removed, forgotten, and I saw his throat drop as he swallowed. My brother was overwhelmed. He looked into my eyes. He smiled at me.

Chapter 53

In the static world of hard facts and figures it was approximately twenty-five minutes before the gold ceased glowing, but the moments that passed while we worked the river were neither brief nor long, were in fact somehow removed from the very restriction or notion of time—we were outside of time, is how it felt to me; our experience was so uncommon we were elevated to a place where such concerns as minutes and seconds were not only irrelevant but did not exist. This feeling, speaking personally, was brought on not only by the wealth our ever-growing piles of gold represented, but also from the thought that this experience was born of one man’s unique mind, and though I had never before pondered the notion of humanity, or whether I was happy or unhappy to be human, I now felt a sense of pride at the human mind, its curiosity and perseverance; I was obstinately glad to be alive, and glad to be myself. The gold from our buckets shone in dense shafts of light, and the branches and limbs of the surrounding trees were bathed in the glow of the river. There was a warm wind pushing down through the valley and off the surface of the water; it kissed my face and caused my hair to dance over my eyes. This moment, this one position in time, was the happiest I will ever be as long as I am living. I have since felt it was too happy, that men are not meant to have access to this kind of satisfaction; certainly it has tempered every moment of happiness I have experienced since. At any rate, and perhaps this is just, it was not something we could hold on to for very long. Everything immediately after this went just as black and wrong as could be imagined. Everything after this was death in one or the other way.

Chapter 54

Traveling back across the dam, Morris made a misstep and tumbled into the deepest part of the river. He fell fully under the water and did not come up. The gold had by then ceased glowing and my brother and I were sitting in the sand beside the fire, hurriedly cleaning ourselves with the water and soap Warm had laid out. My discomfort from direct contact, I should say, had been minimal at first; between the coldness of the river, which tingled the flesh, and also my own excitement and fast-moving blood, I was not aware of any untoward sensation. But by the time the gold once again went mute I felt an expanding heat which became my total concern and focus. Now I was moving just as quickly as I could, dousing and scrubbing my hands and legs and feet. Charlie could only work half as fast and I came to his aid once I had washed myself. I had just finished with his legs when I heard Morris shout out. When I looked up he was dropping through the air.

Charlie and I ran to the shore, by which time Warm had moved to the center of the dam, his heavy bucket pulling at his right side. He stared helplessly at the river and Charlie called to him that he should use Morris’s stick, still wedged in the dam, to pull him clear, but Warm did not seem to hear this. He set his bucket beside his feet, and his face was grim. He took a broad step and leapt from the dam into the poisoned waters. He resurfaced with Morris under his arm. Morris was limp but breathing, his eyes closed, mouth hung open, water lapping into his mouth over his tongue.

As they cleared the river, Charlie and I came nearer to help them but Warm shouted that we must not touch them, and we did not. They lay on the sand, panting and spent, and I ran for the water pot, hefting it to the shore. First I doused Morris, who moaned, and then Warm, who thanked me, but with the pot soon empty and the men in need of a more thorough washing, Charlie and I dragged the two upriver, beyond the formula waters, and laid them in the shallows. I fetched the raw soap and we knelt at their sides, scrubbing the men and splashing them and telling them all would soon be well, but their discomfort only grew and they became increasingly vocal about their pain. Now they were writhing and tensing and shuddering as though they were being slowly immolated, and indeed I suppose that is just what they were being.

We pulled them clear of the water. I took the last of the numbing medicine and covered their faces and scalps with it. Their eyes were coated in a gray-white film, and Morris said he could not see. Then Warm said he could not see. Morris began to weep, and Warm searched out his hand. They lay together holding hands and crying and moaning and drifting away and then suddenly, alertly screaming—both of them at once as though their pains were synchronized. I gave Charlie a secret look that asked: What should we do? His secret response: Nothing. And he was right. Short of killing the men, there was not a thing in the world we might do for them.

Chapter 55

Morris died at dawn. Charlie and I left him on the shore and carried Warm into his tent. He was delirious, and as we laid him on his cot he said, ‘What did we pull, Morris? What time is it?’ Charlie and I did not attempt to answer; we let him alone to sleep or to die. The sky was low with clouds and we slept beside the fire through to the afternoon. When it began drizzling rain over us I sat up and noticed two things at once: Morris was no longer newly dead but dead-dead, his body stiff and cruel and bloodless and somehow light or weightless, resembling a piece of driftwood more than a man; and second, the beavers had climbed out of the water and died on the shore just shy of our camp. That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding. They lay on their bellies, their eyes closed, with the leader in the center, slightly ahead of the others. I did not like to think of the group emerging silently from the waters, marching toward me and my brother as we slept. Did they have it in their beaver minds to swarm and attack us? To ruin us just as we had them with our evil man-made concoctions? Thankfully, I would never know the answer to this.

I felt badly that Morris had died so soon after making the decision to correct his life and abandon the Commodore. I wondered if during his final moments he felt his death was deserved, if he wished he had never left his post, if he passed with compunction and disappointment. I hoped not, but thought he likely had, and I hated the Commodore for his impact then. I hated him as vividly as I have ever hated anyone, and I made a particular decision about him. The decision did not make me feel better but I knew it would eventually, and so it put the matter mostly to rest for the present, despite a lingering bitterness, that our night of shared glory had ended in such a tangle of grotesqueness and failure.

I stood and inspected my legs. Hours before, as I had dropped away to sleep, I was fearful I would awaken to find them covered in the liquid-filled blisters, but there was nothing of the kind. From the midthigh down the skin looked as though it had been burned by an afternoon in the sun; they were warm to the touch and there was a degree of discomfort but it was not at all like Morris’s legs had been, and I did not believe my condition would worsen with time.

Charlie was asleep on his back, eyes wide open, and with a full erection pressing against the front of his pants, which despite my not wanting to know about the thing I took as a sign of wellness. I thought, Who knows in what extraordinary form good tidings might arrive in our lives? I pulled back one of his cuffs and saw that his legs looked just as mine did, red and without hair, but healthy. His hand, however, was much for the worse, with his purple fingers threatening to burst they were so plumped up. The sight of this, along with the beavers, and also Morris made me lonesome; I wished to wake up Charlie to speak with him but decided it best to let him rest.