Der Läufer

A Story of the Arizona Territory, 1863

The wagon train came apart in the late afternoon.

It was the kind of light that made the desert look like something holy, all copper and bleeding red, the mountains in the distance black against a sky that had no business being so beautiful. Elsa Brandt had said so that very morning, standing at the tailgate with her hands on her hips, squinting west. Schau mal, Hans. Schau dir das an. Look at that. And Hans Brandt had looked and agreed it was something and gone back to checking the wheel brace that had been working loose since Santa Fe.

The boy was playing in the rocks when they came.

His name was Wilhelm. He was seven years old and small even for that and his hair was the color of winter wheat and he had been told twice that morning to stay close to the wagons but the rocks on the hillside above the trail had presented themselves with a kind of logic he could not argue with and so he had gone. He was perhaps forty yards up the slope, crouched behind a boulder the size of a milk cow, watching a horned lizard regard him with one yellow eye.

He heard his mother first.

Not words. The sound before words, the sound that lives underneath language and comes out only when language fails. He looked up and what he saw was this: riders coming from the south at a gallop, eight or ten of them, their ponies' hooves raising a curtain of red dust that moved before them like a living thing. The wagons below were still arranged in their noon-rest formation, a loose crescent, and the men were only beginning to understand what the sound meant.

His father ran for the rifle on the wagon seat.

He did not make it.

The boy watched from the rocks and the watching was a thing that entered him and did not leave, a thing that took up residence in some chamber of him that had not existed before that afternoon, that the afternoon itself had carved out and furnished with what it needed. He watched and he did not scream and he did not move and the lizard sat beside him as if it too were watching, as if it understood that the only correct response to such a moment was absolute stillness.

The sounds that came up to him were wrong. They were sounds that did not belong to any world he had lived in. His mother's voice again and then not his mother's voice, and the particular sound of fire finding the canvas on the lead wagon, a sound like something breathing for the first time. The horses of the train screaming. A man whose name he knew, Gottfried Mueller, a cooper from Baden, calling out to God in the old German of his grandfather's church, and then not calling.

It did not take long.

That was the other thing the boy learned that afternoon. That the world as he knew it could be erased in a time so short it was an insult. The sun had not moved. The mountains were where they had been. The sky was still outrageous in its color and the horned lizard was still beside him and below the smoke was beginning to rise black and true into that impossible sky and everything he had ever been told about the permanence of things was a lie.

He stayed in the rocks until full dark.

He did not go down. Some part of him that was older than he was, some ancestral prudence, held him in place. He heard the riders moving through the wreckage. Heard the sounds of their work. He pressed himself against the boulder and he made himself as small as he could and the cold came down from the mountains and he shook with it and still he did not go down.

When he finally descended it was by moonlight and the fires had burned to coals.

What he found there is better left in the dark where it belongs. Some things the eye takes in and the mind refuses and the body simply carries forward because the body has no choice. He moved through the wreck of the wagons like something that had forgotten how to feel. He found his father's rifle broken. He found the flour barrel overturned, the flour gone gray in the dirt. He found his mother's good blue shawl, the one she'd packed in the cedar chest along with the candlesticks and the photograph of her own mother, and it was in the dirt torn and he picked it up and held it and stood there in the moonlit waste and breathed.

He was seven years old.

He walked west because west was the direction they had been going and because he did not know what else to do and because stopping felt like dying. He took what he could find. A canteen half full. A heel of bread gone hard. A skinning knife he found in the dirt near what had been Mueller's wagon. He wrapped himself in his mother's shawl and he walked.

The desert at night was a different country than the desert by day. It had its own architecture, its own citizenry. Things moved in the dark between the rocks and the scrub and the boy heard them and registered them but did not stop. He understood in some preliterate way that fear was a luxury he could not afford, that fear required a future to be frightened for, and the future was something he was not yet in possession of.

He walked through the night and into the gray hour before dawn and when the sun came it came hard and without mercy and he kept walking.

On the second day he found a seep in the rocks and drank from it lying flat on his belly like an animal and he did not think this was strange. He ate the last of the bread and watched a hawk make long slow circles in the sky above him and wondered if it was watching him in return, if it was making calculations.

He was not afraid of dying. This surprised him when he understood it. He had thought he would be. But dying had become familiar in the way that only proximity can make a thing familiar, and walking west felt like the same thing dying felt like, a matter of simply continuing until you didn't.

On the third day he heard the horses.

He went to ground in the scrub without thinking, the way a rabbit goes to ground, all instinct and no deliberation. He lay flat and watched through the dry grass as four riders came along the trail below. They were Anglo men, rough-looking, their gear trail-worn, one of them leading a pack mule with a canvas-covered load that the boy did not try to guess at. They rode without hurry, the way men ride when they have nowhere in particular to be or when they are being careful about where they are going.

The boy watched them.

Then one of the horses stopped.

It was a big gray, the lead horse, and it stopped without the rider asking it to and stood with its ears up and turned toward the hillside. The rider on its back was a large man, broad through the shoulders, with a beard the color of iron filings and a hat that had been black once and was now the color of the country it had traveled through. He looked at the hillside for a long moment.

Raus, he said. Come out.

The boy did not move.

Ich weiss dass du da bist, Junge. I know you're there, boy. He said it in German, low and flat, without particular kindness or cruelty. The way you speak to a dog you are not sure of.

The boy stood up.

The man on the gray horse looked at him for a long time. The boy looked back. He was filthy and sunburned and his lips were cracked and he had his dead father's canteen over one shoulder and his dead mother's shawl still around him and the skinning knife in his belt, and he stood there on the hillside and looked at the man and did not look away.

Gott im Himmel, one of the other riders said softly.

The large man dismounted. He was even bigger standing than he had appeared on the horse. He walked up the slope to where the boy was standing and he crouched down in front of him so they were eye to eye and he looked at the boy with pale gray eyes that had a lot of country in them, a lot of years, and he did not speak for a moment.

Where are your people, he said, in English this time.

The boy looked at him.

The man switched back to German. Wo sind deine Leute.

The boy turned and looked east, back the way he had come, back toward the smoke that was no longer there but that he could still see if he closed his eyes, that he understood he would always be able to see if he closed his eyes.

The man followed his gaze. He was quiet for a moment.

Wie heisst du. What's your name.

Wilhelm Brandt, the boy said. His voice came out strange, unused, like a door that had swollen in the rain.

The man put one large hand briefly on top of the boy's head, not a caress exactly, more the way you might touch a fence post to feel if it's solid. Then he stood up.

Er kommt mit, he said to the others. He comes with.

There was some discussion of this among the riders that the boy listened to without expression. He gathered that the large man was called Richter, that the others were called Dade and Calhoun and a Mexican named Prospero who said nothing at all, that they were not men who made a habit of acquiring children on the trail, and that Richter's authority over them was a settled matter even when they disagreed with how he exercised it.

Richter lifted him onto the back of the gray without asking and mounted behind him and they rode west.

They made camp that evening in the lee of a red rock formation that rose from the desert floor like something that had been interrupted in the middle of becoming a cathedral. The rocks were warm from the day and gave off their heat slowly in the cooling evening and the fire was small and smokeless the way the fire of careful men is small and smokeless.

Richter gave him water and dried meat and watched him eat.

He was not a gentle man in the way that gentle is usually meant. He was a man who had done things and knew what doing things cost, and the knowledge was in him the way iron is in blood, not visible but structural. He had come from Bavaria, the boy learned later, from a town near the Austrian border, at the age of nineteen, and whatever had happened in the twenty years between then and this desert camp had burned away everything that was not essential and left a man who was very hard and occasionally kind, which is a different thing than being gentle.

He asked the boy what had happened. The boy told him. He told it without crying, without particular inflection, the way you report on weather. He told it in German and Richter listened and the others listened without understanding the words but hearing something in them nonetheless, some specific gravity.

When the boy was done Richter was quiet for a long time.

Und du hast dich versteckt, he said finally. And you hid.

Ja.

In den Felsen.

Ja.

The man looked at the fire. Und dann bist du weggelaufen. And then you ran.

The boy considered this. He had not thought of it as running. He had thought of it as walking west. But he understood that the distinction might not hold up under examination.

Ja, he said. I ran.

Drei Tage. Three days. Richter shook his head slowly, not in disbelief but in something closer to recognition. He had a look that the boy would come to know in the months ahead, the look of a man locating something in another person that he had thought was rare.

Dade, who was a lean sun-cooked man from Tennessee with a careful intelligence behind his eyes, asked Richter what the boy had said. Richter told him in English, briefly. Dade listened and looked at the boy and then he laughed, not unkindly, a short exhalation of something that was not quite amusement and not quite admiration but lived between them.

Hell, Dade said. Ain't that something.

Calhoun, who was the youngest of them and not yet twenty and who deferred to Richter the way young men defer to the thing they want to become, leaned forward and studied the boy across the fire.

Three days, he said. How old are you.

The boy told him.

Calhoun shook his head and sat back. He looked at Richter. That boy ought to be dead, he said.

Richter looked at the boy. The fire was between them and the firelight did something to his face, deepened the lines of it, made him look like something that had been there a very long time.

Ja, he said. He should be.

He reached across and refilled the boy's cup from the canteen and the boy drank and the night was cold and the fire was warm and the rocks behind them held the day's heat the way the living hold the dead, slowly, reluctantly, giving it up degree by degree to the indifferent air.

They called him der Läufer first. The Runner. Richter started it, a private thing between the two of them, the way Germans name things in German in a country that speaks something else, a small act of preservation. But it moved into English the way things do, naturally, without ceremony. Prospero shortened it to Runner within a week and that was how it was entered into whatever ledger keeps account of such things.

The boy did not mind it. A name given by the living was better than the name given by the dead. His father's name was his father's now and belonged to a man in the ground in the Jornado del Muerto and he would carry it but he would carry it the way you carry the wound that healed, knowing it was there, feeling it in the cold, but walking on.

He would ride with Richter for four years.

He would learn things in those years that cannot be taught in the ordinary way, things that enter through the hands and the eyes and the long watching of men who know what they know the hard way. He would learn the desert and he would learn the horse and he would learn what men are when there is nothing between them and the consequence of what they do. He would learn that Richter was not a good man by the measure of any church he'd ever been taken to, but that goodness and the other thing, the harder thing, the thing that had put that large hand briefly on the top of his head on a sunburned hillside, were not the same thing and did not require each other.

He would learn that he was still himself. That the rocks had not taken that. That the three days and the dark and the cold had not taken it either, had maybe even given something back that he had not known he possessed, had peeled something away to show him what was underneath, which was this: a boy who ran when he needed to run and went still when he needed to go still and did not look away from things, not even the worst things, and got up when the dark was finished and walked west.

The desert does not care what you carry into it. It will take it or it will leave it and either way it will still be there when you are gone, red and enormous and beautiful in the late afternoon light, the mountains black against a sky that has no business being so beautiful, going on and on in every direction without end.

Der Läufer, they called him.