The Drop Edge of Yonder (19 page)

They lay side by side, legs and sides barely touching, smoking and slipping in and out of each other's dreams. He felt suspended somewhere between earth and sky.

"Or nowhere at all," he said to the fingers rubbing his feet.

The thought was pleasing, that of going nowhere at all. Never to move on. Never to hunt. Never to leave one place for another. Or one woman for another.

Her voice found him again. "After San Francisco, we rode north, Ivan and I.... So wild, so many rivers to cross and guns and horses. Ivan found more gold than anyone would ever need. Then he lost it all in a card game. He lost me, too.... So many men.... I was the only woman for a hundred miles... brutal men.... I never wanted to see you again.... You're wanted for murder... stealing horses... robbing banks.... A very dangerous man. When I saw you in that Mexican hotel I knew you were hunting me.... What I didn't know was that I was hunting you as well."

He curled up like a frightened animal, his arm over his eyes, his heart beating as if he was imprisoned inside a trap.

An old woman wrapped inside a man's button-down canvas jacket was bending down, holding a pipe, inviting him to inhale, to disappear into another dream....

"Men came from everywhere to hear me sing," Delilah was saying. "Then Ivan found me again. He always does, you know. And then he leaves."

Someone was playing a flute in another room and a woman was singing about love and a journey that never ends.

"Now Ivan will die. When he abandoned me in London, an Englishman took me in. A singing teacher. An aristocrat.... I have a certain weakness for aristocrats. So distant and unobtainable.... He taught me opera.... How to speak and read English.... Every time I tried to leave him, he became very cruel."

Across the room the Chinese girl was massaging the singer's feet, or maybe they were his own feet. Her scent made him feel as if he was lying in the middle of a garden. Or a cemetery.

"Ivan found me making love to the Englishman," she went on. "He wanted to kill me. He had been in prison. In Russia.... They tortured him.... There are scars on his cheeks from cigarette burns. He's not a count, you know.... He's a spy and a scoundrel and a businessman. He smiled when he shot the Englishman through the head."

He wondered if Ivan had shot him in Panchito. Or had it been Delilah? Or someone else? Was he, in fact, dead, and dreaming his life and how it had been or might have been? He was on a journey. He was sure of that. A journey that he was unable to track, without a beginning or end, with no boundaries to guide him.

Her voice drifted back to him: "When my parents died, I lived with my grandmother.... She was over a hundred years old.... I had come to her in a dream before I was born.... Because I have mixed blood from many different races, she told me not to become trapped between worlds... I never listened to her, and now it is my fate... to learn how to die, over and over.... In my previous life I... I can't remember.... She told me to leave everything that I was attached to... even her, in order to be in the world but not of it.... When a Portuguese slaver killed my grandmother and took me away, I lost faith in God...."

In the middle of the night, or the next day, he opened his eyes.

Delilah was staring down at him.

"Do you know who I am?" Her voice was a faint whisper, as if shivering through the tops of trees. "I am the one that hunts for redemption in the darkest night, the one who is imprisoned inside dreams within dreams. Because I have lost my way, I am hostage to all that floats between the worlds. Including you."

E FOLLOWED HER PAST THE LOST DREAMERS CURLED UP on their bunks and then down a narrow winding alley, stepping around buckets of waste tossed out of windows, abandoned mining equipment, and Argonauts passed out on soggy wooden planks.

On the waterfront they collapsed against a pile of grain sacks stacked against an overturned wagon, falling asleep with their arms around each other. In front of them, thick layers of fog spread slowly over the harbor's armada of abandoned ships and the rows of river schooners lined up gunwale to gunwale along the sagging exhausted wharfs.

They woke to a blaring trumpet and a pounding drum.

A dozen men wearing shiny black suits appeared through the fog, marching behind a woman in a red fez and yellow pantaloons, holding up a sign announcing the end of the world and the grand opening of the Paradise Hotel.

They sat leaning against each other, their bodies swaying like hollow reeds. The night had left them empty, without any sense of urgency or direction, free of all dreams and intentions. The fog had dissolved and the sun was spreading rays of light across the bay. On the street a small boy whistled as he pushed a ball ahead of him with a stick. A group of Brazilian sailors drifted hand in hand down the embarcadero, followed by a team of mules pulling a wagon loaded with mining equipment.

"I'm going on alone," she said. "I'll come back tomorrow and look for you in this same place. If you're not here, I'll know that whatever happened between us has come to an end."

He sat watching her as she stood up and, without a word, walked away from him. When she finally looked back, he stood up and followed her to the end of the embarcadero, then along a narrow grassy path that led through stunted windswept pine trees and thickets of wild rose bushes. Crossing a steep hill overlooking the sea, they stopped in front of a round hut constructed out of brush and torn canvas. In back of the hut, amulets and prayers written on strips of cloth hung from the branches of a towering oak tree. A wooden statue of a threebreasted woman guarded the hut's entrance. A smaller statue of a grinning monkey with a protruding belly stood behind it, the skin of a rattlesnake wrapped around its neck.

Delilah pulled a canvas flap over the hut's opening. "Welcome to my sanctuary. But if you go in, be warned. You might not come out."

She guided him towards a circle of round polished rocks on the edge of a cliff. Beneath them, long curling waves pounded on a rocky shore. As far as they could see there were no signs of life except for a full-masted schooner beating her way to the north.

They sat silently inside the circle. When the sun disappeared she left him, returning with a bowl of water and a cloth. Removing his clothes, she piled them outside the circle, then dipped the cloth into the bowl of water and washed each part of him.

She spoke as if she was instructing a child: "You have to be clean when you stand inside the circle. Otherwise you will disturb the spirits."

She handed him the cloth and bowl of water and took off her clothes; arranging them in a pile next to his, she allowed him to slowly spread the wet cloth over her body.

They were interrupted by Toku walking towards them. He was dragging a heavy burlap sack and shaking a tambourine and wore a patched yellow-orange robe falling down to his ankles.

"I'm tired and very annoyed," he said, collapsing inside the circle. "You could have told me how long it would take to get here. And I need to be paid before I begin. My spirits won't work for nothing."

"Give him ten dollars," Delilah instructed Zebulon.

"Thirty," Toku replied. "And they're doing you a favor."

"Fifteen," Delilah countered.

After Zebulon paid him, Toku reached into his sack and pulled out three squealing guinea pigs and a curved scimitar. Squatting on his heels, he sliced their bellies into four sections, then poked his fingers through the entrails.

He looked up at Delilah. "You're confused about who is dreaming who. Your problem is that your dreams are controlling you, not the other way around. You no longer know how to stand on the earth. Too much hanging around the Dream Palace and follwing lost men."

"I could have told you that," she said.

"But you didn't," he replied.

He wiped his hands on his robe and jumped out of the circle, shaking his tambourine. Then he jumped back and squatted on his haunches, poking a stick through the entrails again.

"I see a prophecy, which is more than I expected to see, given your cloudy spirit. You will have a son, but he will never know his father. There's something else that I don't understand. Something about never being able to be in one place for longer than a few days."

He pointed at Zebulon. "That will be true for you, too. Not that it's any of my business."

"What is your business?" Zebulon asked.

Toku flopped on his back, cackling like a chicken as he slapped the ground. "Business? My business is making business. Why else would I be in this country? One day I'll have enough to buy a restaurant. And then a hotel. Maybe I'll even go back to my country and invest in a kingdom."

He took a pair of dice from his sack and rolled them over the ground, muttering an invocation in a foreign tongue.

"When you were a small boy, someone tried to drown you. Maybe it was your brother. The one who is not your real brother. Or maybe it was your father. Whoever it was, you're living inside a big confusion. Ever since then you've been afraid of water. Water means death to you, and until you die to who you think you are, you won't be able to live. Make sense? You'll always be on the move, trying to find out who you are. Like the rest of this crazy country."

Toku poked through the entrails again.

"Did someone shoot you in the heart?"

"I think so," Zebulon answered.

"You think so?" Toku said. "What kind of an answer is that?"

"Can we get this over with?" Delilah asked. "I didn't ask you to come up here and talk about him."

"One more thing," Toku said stiffly. "Your friend is a violent man who has done his share of killing and fooling around. He thinks doom is death and death is doom. That's why he wanders around like a ghost not knowing what trail he's meant to walk on.

Silently, he poked through the entrails, then nodded to Delilah. "You're the same. Just passing through. That's why you're drawn to each other and why you will never be together. Do you find that amusing? I don't. You have to find a way to help each other so you can be free of each other. Maybe that's what people in this country mean by love. Who knows? Not me."

He picked up his knife and dug out a narrow trench. Then he instructed them to he down on their backs, head to head. After he had covered their bodies with dirt, except for their eyes and nostrils, he reached into his sack and took out a round mask of a grinning monkey. Then he buried the mask between their heads.

"This mask is your face and the face of everyone who has ever lived. When you understand that the separations between people are illusions, the spirits will go back where they came from. Right now the spirits are angry and confused. All they care about is sucking everything out from inside you and replacing it with greasy smoke. That can be very uncomfortable if you don't know the remedy."

He jumped up and down on Zebulon's chest and stomach, banging the drum and smacking his thick lips. Then he did the same to Delilah. Lighting up a half-smoked cheroot, he blew smoke in four directions, haranguing Delilah in his native language. She had no idea what he was saying as he continued to shout, more and more agitatedly. Finally, fed up and more than a little afraid, she pulled herself out of the trench and staggered to the creek, where she submerged herself in the water, only to have Toku drag her by the hair back into the circle.

"Oh...! Ah...! Ha...!" he cried, banging his drum and spitting into Zebulon's face and then into Delilah's. "Oh...! Ah...! Eh...! Ha...! Ho...! Ah...! Ha...! Eh...! Ho...!"

Suddenly Delilah dropped to the ground, rolling over like a snake shedding its skin. Zebulon fell down beside her, his arms jerking in spasms over his head as a current of energy rose violently up his spine. They remained flopping and writhing next to and on top of each other until the energies roaring through them stopped, and everything became flat and empty.

"The bad spirits have left," Toku pronounced. "Or most of them. If they come back, I'll need more than fifteen dollars to get rid of them."

He put the mask into his sack, bowed to the statue of the monkey, then to each of them.

"If you're lucky, you will never see me again," he said and walked away.

HE NEXT MORNING THEY WALKED BACK INTO SAN Francisco. "If we're goin' on a long ride we should get ourselves outfitted," he said, pointing to a clothing store.