Deep Fire

In the low sun the shadow-topped mesas burned orange-red like afterglowing coals from a fire welled up deep within the Earth. Hooves of horses broke tension on the sand and slid down embankments slowly, kicking up sand and grit and dust to be inhaled by the fellow to his behind.

“Stop.” A rider tugged on his reigns, dismounting his Fox Trotter sitting single file in the march. “Gotta take a shit.”

All remaining men halted, spitting and grumbling as he shrunk into the horizon. Some few steps and he found a suitable bush to make his toilet, squatting down and grunting as hard bristles stabbed his scrotum.

The rider left his waste unburied. “Leavin’ it for the injuns,” he snickered while kicking his boots through his stirrups.

“Ain’t no injuns out here.”

“Sure as hell there is.”

“Naw, there ain’t none.”

The man’s tongue struck his course teeth like a matchbook, flaring his nostrils and flicking his ten gallon. “Listen, son, not three days ago I saw Apache on the horizon and we ain’t going anywhere fast.”

“Well that was there and then. I can tell there ain’t any reds out here.”

“And how in the Goddamn can you do that?”

“I just can.”

“‘Just can,’” he spat. “You’re a damn fool.”

The sun continued on its path. The charred mesa tops wound down the desert obelisks and the shadows they cast moved ever eastward. That evening the party made no fire and sat aimless and hunched over on their mats and rolls among the tired horses. At supper disagreement broke out. “You’re a thieving fucking nigger,” one spat.

 “Fuck you, I save my rations you piece of shit. Don’t call me a nigger.”

“Hell you ain’t. You done nothing to us but be a fucking coward and a thieving vermin. I say we gut you and see back what you stole from me.”

“You a real Godless sumbitch.”
Both men lunged at each other, the others unmoved and uncaring as the stones. They tussled and grunted with each hit and began to bite and grab and pull. Finally one caught the other’s revolved and shot it up at his opponent’s face; blood and gore and fragments of bone flew out his cheek and his last breath came whistling through his ears.

The living one took haggard breaths and spat his lip-bloodied sputum to the floor. The spectators had all looked but said nothing. Nighttime neared and the mesas went cold, their shadows stretching to the horizon and ending the day before the sun crossed the proper border. All the men helped drag the body out into the cold sand to be left unembalmed for an early burial in the morning. The riders turned back to sit meaninglessly around an imaginary fire.

One man, last among them to sleep, rose the alarm. He first whispered to the man beside him, and then he to his, and they all stood awake and silently gawking at the body. Black figures, partially translucent like conjured from ashy smoke circled the cadaver like vultures; misty and vague yet solid and torpid as if made from wet sand and silt. All were different; tall, short, thin, fat; but all men, and all black beyond any of African kinship. More came yet, from the dark, from the edges that knew no eye was trained on them and each blink another was added to the score.

The men still watched as listless as ever. Like a crowd of cynics gathered to watch a magic trick their eyes were intent and judgmental with crossed arm heavy brows. The vortex of black husks condensed in on the corpse and shaw it with bony fingers, tearing ribbons of flesh. Ghostly forms overlapped and intermingled like a vapour from hell and turned the slow march into a lurid ritual of twisted limbs devouring blood and bones and sinew. Not until the entire corpse was torn and masticated into loose chunks swirling in the void did it end.

Each and every figure disappeared like sawdust blown from a bench. They left the desert behind, no body to be found. The spectators stood remote, like a congress of stones set down many aeons ago by long dead natives. They watched the blackness of night in the hope of a speck or breeze of that arcane and paranormal occurrence gone before them; no wind was on the plains tonight. Just as they almost fell back to a hazy, unsure sleep the night condensed one final messenger from whichever infernal bastion tonight’s occasion originated; it took the form of the corpse reanimated. It staggered like it knew nothing except forward but was more material and living than the now dissipated ghosts. The dead man was whole again with no wound from bullets nor flesh torn off, but its skin was now thick and greasy like painted in wet charcoal. Eyes wide and unblinking it made its way to the spectators, its trajectory made clearer with each step. It did not regard any man, not even the murderer of its body. only one youth who stood stiff and unemotive.

“Why are there no Indians here?” Its voice was too deep, too gravelly, too harsh, too casual, and too familiar.

“I… I j-just know they ain’t here…”

“Just know,” it mimicked.

The cadaver receded, vanishing in a short instant. The riders felt the fire deep within the Earth go out forever and ever and ever.