The Drop Edge of Yonder (15 page)

When he demanded another game, Zebulon refused.

"Wait for me," the Commodore said to his men, and marched up the stairs.

It was late afternoon before the Commodore joined Zebulon and his men on the veranda.

Esmeralda watched them from an upstairs window as they trudged back to The Prometheus, the largest and most wellappointed steamship in the world.

On board, Zebulon was given the master suite with a wellstocked bar, a dining table, and a full-length mirror over the huge round bed. The only time he saw the Commodore was through the half-open door of his private lounge. He was sitting opposite Ephraim Squier, a bottle of champagne between them, both of them too engaged in conversation to notice Zebulon as he strolled past.

The journey lasted a day-and-a-half over calm seas and leaden skies. When they docked in the steamy port of Colon in the middle of the night, Zebulon was the only passenger to disembark.

EBULON STOOD AT THE END OF A SAGGING DOCK, HIS clothes drenched from suffocating heat. Lightning cracked across the harbor, exposing a sodden collection of wooden houses and shacks. As he headed towards land and then down the waterfront, he passed mining equipment shoved between half-open crates of shovels, engine parts, coffee, hides, and tobacco. Canned goods, mixed with bundles of workers' clothes, were piled next to tin boxes full of medical supplies, each tin identified in large red lettering: TYPHOID FEVER, CHOLERA, SNAKEBITE, and MALARIA.

The only signs of security were two drunken soldiers sprawled against a train locomotive; around them, half-starved dogs were lurking in the shadows of storage sheds.

On the main street, black clouds of mosquitoes swarmed over rotting flesh and open sewage. Drunken prospectors guarded supplies with shotguns and rifles; others suffering from cholera, dysentery, and malaria were propped in doorways or sprawled across wooden planks.

Zebulon embraced it all: the smells and decay and violence, all the noisy chaos that marked a new frontier.

He stepped around a man in a top hat kneeling in the mud and spitting up thick clots of blood. Further on, a crowd of Jamaican laborers stood in the doorway of a burned-out house, laughing at a black whore as she confronted an opium-addled Chinaman who was struggling to pull up his pants. Their laughter stopped when the whore slashed a knife across the Chinaman's throat, then rifled his pockets only to come up empty.

The only hotel was locked for the night, a FULL UP sign posted on the door. Zebulon walked on until he found a sign advertising a fifty-cents-a-night patch of straw in a crumbling storehouse full of railroad spikes and spare parts.

At dawn he made his way to the train station, a large stone building at the edge of town where a wood-burning locomotive was hitched to eight canary-yellow carriages. At the rear of the train, men were loading supplies into two baggage cars. On all sides of the crates, names and mottoes were painted in red, white, and blue: HOOSIER, CALIFORNIA OR BUST, PILGRAM'S PROGRESS - CALIFORNIA EDITION, HAVE YOU SEEN THE ELEPHANT?

Most of the passengers were men except for a few exhausted wives already fed up with this so-called fast and easy crossing to the Pacific. Everyone was dressed for the great departure: the men in waistcoats, flamboyant shirts, fashionably tailored pants, and beaver hats; the women in ankle length full-skirted calico and cotton dresses, their sun-scorched faces covered with drooping straw hats and lace bonnets. Indians in white linen pants and straw hats worked through the crowd selling fruit, chicken, and papaya wrapped in banana leaves. A group of Argonauts, lubricated with cheap liquor, played violins and flutes and banged on homemade drums, singing:

Thunder rumbled, followed by a violent rainsquall. As suddenly as the rain started, it stopped, leaving the street even more flooded and steamy.

The stationmaster strode into the middle of the street, firing an ancient musket: "All aboard," he shouted. "All aboard for the Panama City Express!"

Zebulon found a seat next to an overweight Irishman, a former pub owner from Belfast with a hacking cough and rheumy eyes who wept with relief as the train slowly inched through the town, then chugged across a mangrove swamp through groves of palm trees and giant bamboo. From their open windows the passengers caught glimpses of red-breasted toucans and green and yellow parrots gliding through thick canopies of leaves. As the train pushed slowly into the jungle, they lost sight of the sky and were left with the screams of howler monkeys and the smell of the engine's wood smoke mixed with the fragrance of rotting leaves.

The Irishman lowered his head, unable to contemplate the display of abundant decay. "You won't see Irish on this run. They don't do well in warm climes. My mum and dad died in the potato famine of '46. When my wife ran off to Australia with a sergeant in the British army, I sold my pub and sailed for Boston. Worked as a bartender and baker, then got a job on the waterfront. Hated every goddamn minute, but saved enough for the gold fields."

They passed naked children staring at the train with huge empty eyes, then shacks covered with palmetto leaves, and further on, a funeral train stationed on a sidetrack where bodies were being lifted into two black carriages reserved for the dead. As Zebulon looked closer, he saw his own face staring back at him. Or was it Hans, the German merchant from The Rhinelander?

Suddenly there were yells and screams as the carriage swayed, then lurched back and forth and left the track.

"A washout," the conductor shouted, walking calmly through the carriage. "It happens, folks. We'll be up and running in no time."

The passengers stumbled outside to sit on the side of the tracks in front of a roaring torrent of brown water. Some had bruises and broken bones, but no one was seriously hurt. Where the bridge had been, there were now only two abutments of masonry, one on each side of the swollen river. Towards the other side of the river they could make out a spur and several iron girders protruding through whirlpools of thick green slime.

The conductor consulted with the engineer, then walked over to address the passengers. He presented a reassuring presence with his black silver-buttoned uniform and snap-brim cap set over a square face and neatly trimmed mustache.

"There's a settlement down river. We'll cross on canoes, then go the rest of the way on mules. No cause for alarm, folks. We'll be in Panama in a day or two. Maybe three. Once the river goes down, we'll ferry over everyone's supplies and get them to you in Panama. We've never lost anything yet."

The men talked among themselves or tried to comfort their wives, several of whom were openly weeping.

"Everything is under control, folks," the conductor repeated. "It will take ten days for a crew to pull the train back. Only thing to do is go on. Nothing to be alarmed about. A walk through a jungle paradise will do us all good."

Zebulon's entire body began to shake as his eyes lost focus and his brain felt as if it was about to explode. Stumbling towards the river, he sank to his knees and vomited.

He was barely conscious when the conductor and two male passengers lifted him onto an improvised stretcher. They carried him for over a mile until they reached a clearing where five bamboo huts were raised up on stilts over the flooded river. In the middle of the clearing a few Indians were waiting to trade bananas and yams for trinkets.

Zebulon was lifted up a ladder into one of the huts, where an ancient and toothless Indian woman wearing a muslin shift bathed his feverish forehead with a wet cloth, then poured green coconut water into his mouth from a gourd, followed by a bitter paste of root bark mixed with guava, lemon, and green chilies.

"Cholera," he heard a voice say before he passed out. "Or parrot fever. Most likely he'll be dead by morning."

He imagined a seagull soaring over towering waves. Come closer, the waves howled, and then he heard another sound, like a dress being ripped apart, and he thought of Delilah tearing at her heart. Or was it his heart?

"Come, sweet death," he heard her sing as the waves howled again. "Deliver yourself to me."

E LAY ON HIS BACK IN THE MIDDLE OF A DUGOUT CANOE. There was no hawk nor gull above, nor towering waves below, only the sound of the swollen river and then a scream from one of the other canoes as it rammed into a submerged log, throwing two Argonauts and an Indian into the water, their bodies sweeping over the rapids like a trail of wet laundry.

When they finally reached the far shore, several miles downriver from where they had started, Zebulon was wrapped in a strip of canvas and tied to a travois behind a mule. Once inside the jungle he was transferred to a stretcher. When the rotting vegetation became too thick, the Argonauts were forced to hack their way through the undergrowth with knives and machetes. Soon the light grew dimmer and then disappeared altogether. Poisonous plants brushed against the stretcher, dropping leeches and centipedes that left throbbing welts on his face and hands. Once when they stopped to bury someone, he heard a voice praying in an unknown language, and he wondered if the prayers and the grave were meant for him.

They spent the night in a small clearing where he was laid on a mat of cowhide and spoon-fed a thick soup that he immediately threw up. His feet had turned blue, and his fever had continued to rise even though his bones had stiffened and his teeth were clenched and then chattering from chills. Bats swooped overhead, feeding off insects half as large as his hand. Tree frogs croaked, and somewhere a jaguar screamed. In his delirium the jaguar's scream sounded as if it came from inside him.

He lost all sense of time, aware only that he was still being carried on a stretcher and that somehow the jungle was receding. Towards evening they reached the crest of a hill where a soft wind was stirring through clumps of bunchgrass. Around him Argonauts began to weep and offer prayers of gratitude.

The conductor propped him up. "Take a look. From sea to shining sea."

White clouds swept across a deep green valley. Further on, beyond a range of rolling green hills, he could see the Pacific. In the opposite direction, the Caribbean was visible over a thick roof of steaming jungle.

As Zebulon stood up, spreading his arms towards the two oceans, a large yellow butterfly circled his head, then two more, until his legs buckled and he collapsed.