For almost eighteen months they traced a wary arc across the southern states — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona — keeping a safe distance from the line that marked the beginning of the map. They never stopped in any town for long. They switched hotels after dark, riding in rivers to become invisible, or splitting up and taking different trails so those in pursuit would not know which one of them to follow. They travelled under false identities. Sometimes they dropped down to the Mexican border, and spent a night in Tombstone or El Paso, but they always left the next morning, a feeling of ricochet as they headed north or east, into a land where nothing could happen. They stayed in red-light districts, near railroad tracks, on waterfronts. Places with names like Hell’s Half Acre. Places with no name at all. Anywhere so long as it was cheap, anonymous. One night they watched an orchestra of ladies who were clothed only in their undergarments. For their own protection, the ladies played inside a cage that had been electrified. Three men had died trying to climb between the bars. In Fort Griffin they met a man who had no ears and no fingers, his punishment for stealing a fellow-miner’s gold. Life descended into nightmare. Countless evenings where they were barricaded in some room, listening for footsteps on the stairs. His father kept his right hand thrust into the bosom of his coat, as if he had a gun in there. People took to calling him Napoleon. ‘Big mistake, heading into Russia like that,’ they would say. Or, ‘How’s the syphilis?’ ‘I’m not Napoleon,’ his father would mutter. ‘I’m nobody.’ All he wanted was to feel safe. All he was seeking was refuge, invisibility.
‘Not a word to anybody. Not one word.’
1882–1884. The lunatic years.
Wilson thought it must have happened during the poker game in Reno. When his father let that man reach below the table, knowing it could be a gun that he was reaching for. When, smiling, he let that man reach down. You have to be part crazy to orchestrate that kind of moment.
It was what dreams did to you if they did not come true. They made you mad with the constant glimpsing of them. The dreams were there, but only just. The heels of the dreams were always vanishing round corners, and when you reached the corner they were gone. Only you saw them; that was what made them so valuable, so terrible. Only you saw them. And when there were things that only you could see, then you were crazy for sure. A footprint on the sand, one snapped twig in a forest. The trail that you were following did not exist for anybody else. On you went.
‘Keep that mouth of yours sewed up. Good and tight now. Good and tight.’
Some nights he woke with a cry, thinking that his father was bending over him with a needle and thread. He could feel a tugging at the corner of his mouth as the first stitch tightened. He could smell his father’s bitter breath. Hold still now. Just hold still. Other nights he dreamed that the horror had already been accomplished. He would lie awake as morning came and would not be able to open his lips. He feared mutilation at the hands of his own father. Towards the end he had even feared death. They would be sitting in a hotel room in Bastrop or Santa Fe and he would see his father’s head lurch round and fasten a mad but calculating look on him. He was the only person in the world who knew about the map. Could he be trusted with the knowledge? He slept in snatches during the daylight hours and lay awake all through the night. A son fearing his father, his father fearing everyone. It could not go on.
Seventeen months after that game of cards, his father was dead. In a boarding-house in Silver City. The name of the town cast an ironic shadow over the event. His father had never in his life sought any metal but gold. In that one sense you could say that he had been faithful. His chest had been crushed by a stagecoach as he crossed the main thoroughfare at midnight. Listening for the dreaded footsteps, he had not heard the wheels.
It was a decent boarding-house, with curtains in the windows and no gambling allowed. His father’s hand lay on the clean sheet, fingers curled. Cracks ran lengthways in the nails. His father’s wool shirt hung on the back of a chair, the breast decorated with medals of blood.
Exploiting his father’s weakness, he did something he would never otherwise have dared to do. He took his father’s hand. And held it.
‘You got the map?’ His father could only gurgle. He was drowning in his own fluids.
Wilson nodded.
‘It’s safe?’
He pressed his father’s hand. ‘It’s sewed into my jacket,’ he said, ‘just like you showed me.’
‘Never found it, did we?’
He could only smile down.
‘On the grave,’ his father said, ‘I want some words.’ His eyes cleared for a moment, a gap between clouds. Then he coughed, and his chin tipped backwards, and his voice filled with blood. Wilson thought that he might never hear the words.
At last his father found an ounce of breath.
‘Still looking,’ he said.
Two hours later he was dead.
The last stitch, double-strength, was now in place; the map was back where it belonged. And he was standing on the land that it described, ground that had taken his father’s luck, two-sided though it may have been, and spent it all. He could have inked himself in, with a hat, a moustache and a broken foot, three inches to the south-west of the women with the pointed breasts. He was here, he was on the map, and yet he seemed no closer to anything. His father would never have imagined such disillusion to be possible. Bending over the needle, he severed the thread with his teeth, then tied the two tails in a solid knot.
He stood up, poured some water into a bowl. Then he began to wash. He was expected on the Mesa del Norte for dinner.
‘I hear that you’re looking for gold.’ Monsieur de Romblay’s face lowered over the table like a huge ripe fruit that might drop at any moment from its branch. ‘Is that correct?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Wilson said. ‘It is.’
Monsieur de Romblay nodded. ‘I didn’t think that you could have been drawn here simply by the beauty of the place,’ he said with a smile, his face resembling a fruit more than ever as it glowed and dimpled in the candlelight.
There were a few sardonic chuckles. Then a man with a thin face and prominent knuckles leaned forwards.
‘It would be better to go back to where you came from, would it not?’ The man’s name was Pineau. He was not a man for whom Wilson had developed any great fondness.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Your country is famous for gold. California, Montana, even Idaho.’ Pineau paused. ‘But Santa Sofía — ’
Wilson waited for the laughter to fade. Some people cannot resist trying to soil and ridicule your dreams. Maybe it is because they have none of their own.
‘It is my contention,’ he said finally, ‘that, sometime in the future, it will be discovered that this entire peninsula is nothing less than an extension of the famous gold-fields of Northern California.’
You could have heard a dime land in the rug.
He sat back in his chair. It was the first dinner party that he had ever attended. The men wore shirts that gleamed like ivory. The women had jewelled necks and ears; flowers blossomed in their hair. He did not belong in such exalted company. He had washed with carbolic soap. He had trimmed his moustache. He had dressed in his best blue-flannel shirt, a black four-in-hand tie of his father’s and pair of dark trousers which he had borrowed from Jesús Pompano. But still he looked like the men they put in fields to scare the birds.