The Outlander (38 page)

“Coffee,” said one, speaking to the tablecloth.

“Steak and bread,” said the other.

Now the brothers just sat there and ate their breakfast without a nod to
the waiter or a glance round at the rest of the patrons of the hotel, or even out the
window, beyond which stood two beautiful young women, talking and laughing. Of course
they could hear the laughter, but it failed to
interest them, even
enough for one to turn his head. When they'd finished eating, one took up a
newspaper, separated out a section for the other, and they both set to reading.

The doctor, too, held a newspaper on the table in front of him, but
he'd already read it. And neither he nor his son could tear his eyes away from
these strangers.

“It suggests mild gigantism, doesn't it?” he
ventured.

“But they look proportionate. No elongation of the face or limbs, no
hypertrophy of the bones.”

“And then there's the ginger hair,” said the old
man.

“What? It's not that uncommon.”

“Red hair and fair skin, tanned quite deeply in fact, but I can see
no freckles. Can you?”

“Dad, it's impossible to see this far away.”

“And, now that I think of it, look at the clothes. See the . .
.”

“Boys,
really
!” his wife whispered, and they fell
silent. The old man shook his paper and straightened in his chair, but he and his son
continued to stare.

The doctor could see: impeccable manners on men who clearly had spent much
of their time outdoors. Fine black boots, manifestly expensive to begin with, now ruined
by overuse. A life of privilege, now gone, or perhaps abandoned. Their coats and
breeches were tailor-made to accommodate their great size, and yet these men had chosen
a design of deliberate simplicity, an aggressive kind of modesty in its lines, achieving
in the end only the homeliness common to all oversized clothing. The coats were also
worn and needing repair.

“Heavy-footed too. I'd guess they each weigh a lot.”

“I disagree, Dad. I think they are almost graceful. Good posture
— another proof against gigantism.”

The doctor's wife sighed with afflicted patience. And she started to
talk brightly. “Well, since we're talking
incessantly
about twins,
I knew one once. What was her name? Darby. No . . . Darcy? Maybe Darcy was the other
one.” The doctor's eyes drifted to his wife's face and stared through
it for an interval, then wandered back to the giant men again.

“They disliked each other, isn't that funny? But you know, it
struck me as perfectly understandable. Why would you love a copy of yourself? Why does
everyone else get to be themselves, but you don't?”

The waiter swanned by and ignored the old doctor's wave.

“Bloody,” he sighed and looked sadly at his coffee cup.

He took up his newspaper, passing disinterested eyes over the minute grey
print.

“Diphtheria epidemic.” “Delays in the postal service
— why can't we be more like Britain?” “Worst landslide in mining
history — superstitious miners predicted it.” He sighed and turned to local
news where he saw a promising headline: “Church Group Ran Dog Fighting Club
— Popular Parson Bookmaker.” He began to read that one.

There was a sharp laugh from the twins' table. One of the men was
shifting violently in his chair. The doctor glanced up and saw him holding out his
section of the newspaper for his brother to see, folded neatly into four, and he was
pointing at a photograph: the landslide at Frank. And the widow, the lone woman among
the survivors.

THE TRAIN'S WHISTLE
echoed as it departed down the
valley. The track had been cleared finally, and the first regular train had come and
gone. Curious survivors had wandered down to see it. The widow scrubbed the darkened
wood along the platform of McEchern's store, a bucket at her side, the vague bawdy
smell of old meat rising to her nostrils, legacy of spilt blood.

“Hey, girlie!” shouted a bent old fellow. The widow turned a
fatigued face to him, rag in her hand.

“You got company on that train.”

“What do you mean?”

The man grinned widely, a gap-toothed smile. “Couple of gents asking
about you down there. Could be your lucky day.” He chuckled and went on
mumbling.

THEY CAME UP
the hill with rifles across their backs,
following a newborn trail that went in gentle switchbacks through avalanche debris. Here
and there the trunks of fallen trees were cut away, allowing a man to walk without
bending or crawling; boulders were dragged aside or levered downhill to clear a path.
Otherwise, human traffic acquiesced to the
natural flow of the
land, now jagged and white, and mostly motionless.

One brother touched the other's shoulder.

“Smoke.” They'd been told to look for the trading post,
the only place standing, the only place with a stove. And indeed, a thin ribbon of smoke
rose into the air. But then they saw another, and two more, rising from the very earth.
The whole landscape seemed to be smoking, smouldering. Someone passed them, striding
quickly along, a barrel on his back, saying, “That's the coal burning. Come
back in twenty years and it'll still be burning.” And then he was gone.

So amazed were the brothers at this that they began to wander among the
burning culm, gawking at the ghastly place they had come to. Perhaps this was why they
didn't react to the first gunshot, but stood looking at where the bullet had
pinged off and left a pale chip in the limestone. They heard the second shot, but failed
to give it meaning. It seemed like the burning landscape was popping, like some
hard-shelled, infernal oatmeal. It wasn't until they looked up and finally saw the
widow standing on the deck of a huge, cockeyed tent, struggling to reload a rifle,
shells dropping from her shaking fingers, that they understood themselves to be under
fire.

Immediately the twins split up, scuttling low and fast as rabbits, eyes
white, pawing at their own rifles as they ran. On her perch, the widow slammed the
breach closed and drew the stock to her jaw, choosing the leftmost man. She led him
— aiming slightly ahead of the rushing, stumbling form — and squeezed down
hard and fired. The roar and kick of the gun blinding her for an instant so that when
she righted herself she saw only the mad wheeling of his arms as he dove, coattails
tossed up arsewise, and then he was gone behind a rock. Cursing,
she swung right to sight the other man, but he was gone too. Behind which tree? Which
rock? Again she swung left, drifted to centre, her vision wide and unfocused, keyed on
motion, on sound, the gun's stock trembling against her cheek.

She'd missed them both. Three shots, all gone wide. The disaster of
it was palpable. There was silence but for a voice or two from uphill, miners calling in
question, curious at the unaccustomed sound. She stood outside the store, exposed,
motionless, while somewhere out there her unseen brothers-in-law were loading up.
Horribly, unbidden, the memory came to her of her husband cheering when out of sheer
luck she had killed her first guinea fowl: “You hit meat!” Her mind
stuttered and went blank; she didn't know what to do.

McEchern, for his part, was crouched behind his counter, covering his
head, after having given her the gun and the shells, then hurriedly removing himself
from the impending show.

The world was unearthly still. And then the widow turned on her heel and
dashed through the tent, dodging goods and the jutting counter, and ran out the rear
flap. Without pause, she flew off the platform. Her boots hit the ground together, and
she went crashing and leaping through the trees in her peculiar, hobbling gait.

She ran downhill and out into a massive clearing, cutting laterally across
the farthest extent of the landslide, her back wincing against the expected gunshot.
Then she was back into the thick of the trees, throwing herself in long strides down the
draw, grabbing saplings with her free hand and sliding on the loose groundcover,
ploughing up huge drifts
of pine needles with her boots. Nothing
moved but she; no sound but her panting. She didn't dare look behind, but ran,
keeping to the lower ground, till she scrambled up a small rise and plunged over the
other side.

Her husband's flat voice in her ear,
That's how you find
and kill something. Skylight it — wait till it runs over a hill, look for the
silhouette.
The slam of a door. The roar of the shotgun, whistling rain of
arrows, the sound of laboured breathing. A crack like a cannon in the dark. Nightmare
piled upon nightmare. Her breath came in ragged and helpless sobs from her aching chest.
She was a brash and racketing thing, alerting her pursuers to her exact position, nearly
shouting to them in her terror, and leaving a trail of broken branches and scuffs that
anyone but the blind could follow.

She hadn't fully believed it when she'd seen them. And
clearly, they couldn't believe what they were seeing. Their faces, white and
staring as she sighted down on them, the too familiar eyes, the wide, hard jaws. His
jaw, his face, twinned, staring up at her in astonishment, and she, yearning to murder
him again. His mouth falling open in surprise. A pink mist floating on the air, its dull
taste on her lips, droplets on her hands, chin, forehead. His soundless open mouth as he
fell. His mouth, saying, “You can have another,” saying, “They come
and go, like calves.”

She ran hard, tall cedars stuttering past her, pickets in an endless
fence, lines everywhere, flying depthless, her boots in syncopated beat along the
ground, breath now regular and deep. She came over a shallow rise and immediately
tumbled into the draw, falling into a stumbling chaos, the gun held aloft until she hit
the thin trickle of water in a splash and
thrashed through it,
turned and followed the creek downhill like an animal. Boulders along the rill's
edge festooned with moss and white flowers. Not so far away, the whisper of a
waterfall.

And then she realized she'd reached it, the Indian bridge. The widow
stood gasping among the callow greenery while somewhere uphill voices echoed. For a
moment, she did not move. Behind her stood the bridge, spidery and delicate. She was
frozen, willing herself to drop the rifle, to open her fingers and let it go. In her
mind she was assessing the sagging bridge, the slick wet bark that waited for her boots,
the loose and half-rotted handropes. The fallen aspens sagged over the gorge, roots
exposed. Could it take her weight? Could it bear theirs? She knew she could not make it
across with the rifle in her hand.

Then she heard them, their footfalls, sounds of progress through water.
She dropped the rifle.

The widow reached the sloped face of the chasm and hopped lamely down to
where the nearest aspen cantilevered out over the void. She threw herself onto it in a
hurried clip-clop, her hands snatching at the ropes. She was five feet out when the
first swinging movement hit her, the organic response to her weight, ripping along the
length of it in a tugging, heaving motion. She groaned and forced herself on,
goat-footed, hunched, willing her feet to hold the slithering deck, which was no more
than a single aspen pole. Ahead of her, it tapered to a point, on the other side the
same thing, and between them was an unanchored span of some twenty feet, slung roughly
with saplings and rotting rope, badly sagged.

The first rifle shot hit the air. She lurched and fell screaming against
one of the hand ropes, slid to her knee. The drop below her was fifty, sixty feet. Mist
rose from some unseen source of water, and she hung there suspended over it, gazing into
the depthless white. The bridge rocked gently like a hammock. The percussion of the
rifle was still in her ears. Her fingers closed round the simple, solid rope. She could
hear her heart, hear herself swallow. And him at her heels. Following. No, he was dead
and could not follow. He was not there. A strange calm went through her. Up she came in
a rush.

“Stop, Mary!” came a voice, almost pleading. The echo of it
carried on the hollow air. She did not stop but struggled on, carefully,
conscientiously, until she was nearly at the other side. But as she hit the far side and
began to run, to scramble up the cliff 's crumbling switchbacks, there came a
cannonade behind her. Trunks of trees exploded in pale coronas of splinters. Something
ripped past her temple and her hair briefly burned. Her pantleg yanked hard where a
bullet slapped through. And yet, it would seem, these hunters were as poor marksmen as
she herself was, for every one of their shots missed, and she still ran, still alive.
And then she was in the trees and invisible to them.

She ran until she could not run any more, nor breathe nor think, and then
she ambled along on jouncing, shaking legs, blood clabbering in her veins, willing
herself to keep going, until finally her knees gave out, and she knelt with a thump on
the ground, empty-headed and desolate. Thirsty, thirsty. A waking dream of bending to a
mountain stream, drinking the way a horse does, sucking at the surface, a painful
coldness going down.

She didn't know how long she stayed in the clearing, motionless and
empty as a nun in patient contemplation. A Cooper's hawk regarded her from its
nest. It stood straddle-legged and levered over the edge, a curious onlooker, a low purr
in its throat. The widow stared dumbly up at it, seeing the feathered pantaloons and the
smooth, ermined chest. Black inquiring eyes. The neck seeming jointless and fluid with
each small tilt of the scowling head. She wondered momentarily whether this creature was
her watcher, her keeper. But the thought fell in on itself, because the widow knew she
had no keeper.