Beyond the Horizon by Ryan Ireland Page B

part of the country had taken their toll on the place.
    The stranger rested his hands on his hips and gauged the sun. He figured it to be midafternoon, figured it to be a time when America was still a geographical location. Somewhere hundreds of miles, several time zones away, Johnny Appleseed was littering the Midwest with fruit trees, a stove pan on his head. In the south Pecos Bill wrangled tornados, shot holes in the sky. Hiawatha trolled the rivers of Iroquois territories, trying to bring his people together.
    â€˜Well, then,’ the stranger said aloud. ‘I suppose I have some work to do.’

Four
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    What possessed the man to keep on traveling as he did baffled the stranger. Rarely did the man pause for sleep. He rode on through both day and night, stopping only when the mule tired. Traces of the man became more scant. The stranger picked up his pace until he came to nearly a trot. He seemed to be racing against the day, trying to duck under the sun as it collided with the horizon. If the man slept any length of time, the stranger figured it must be in the saddle. Nightmares woke the man often. And of all nightmares—those realities born from our wakeful lives and perpetuated in our minds—the man thought of his rescue from the ship.
    At first both he and his father took it for a hallucination. Dusk and the hours following it on the deck of the ship proved good for this. Every couple nights another man committed suicide because of these visions. Some men murdered men because they were told to do so by long-since-eaten crew members.
    â€˜Do you see it?’ his father asked.
    The boy nodded meekly, too afraid to say anything, afraid the other crew might hear, afraid the vision would dissipate. Around them the crew slumbered away, snoring. In the captain’s quarters, the first mate was having his way with a younger deck hand. For the last five nights he came for the boy afterward. Twice his father successfully defended him. Three times now his father had to watch.
    The canoe glided stealthily through the water, two shadowed figures inside dipped their paddles and stroked in unison. Behind them, equally as clandestine, came a fleet of canoes. What moonlight there was cast the mystery men’s shadows long into the placid waters.
    The father instructed his son to follow him. They clambered down below deck and into their quarters. Above them they could hear the rhythmic thrusting of the first mate sodomizing another boy. Hearing this gave the father pause and he looked at his son. Then he took a kerosene lantern—the only lantern whose fuel hadnt been imbibed. He lit it, held it in one hand.
    â€˜Take the other end of the footlocker,’ he said. The boy did as he was told. ‘If these visitors is what I think they is, tonight ends it.’
    The man had not slept for two days. He rode the mule until it staggered off the trail and cantered in a circle in the brush. The man shushed the mule, dismounted and rubbed its muzzle.
    â€˜Been ridin you too hard,’ he said. ‘Suppose we oughta set up here for a day, maybe two.’
    Even as he spoke he glanced around, looked down the path, up at the slopes on either side. Alone as he ever was, he knew there were eyes upon him, though he could not see them. As he set up camp, he kept the shiv in hand. Darkness came on quickly here in the depths of the valleys. Soon the black behemoth mountains hulked darker than the sky, which unfurled like singed parchment, blotched indigo and purple, stippled with stars.
    He sat upright against a lean tree listening for the sounds of visitors. He squinted into the blackest of the shadows to adjust his vision to the night. Then he shielded his eyes from the glow of the sky and scanned the passage he’d taken between the mountains. It could have very well been a trick of the mind, but the man saw something dart from one shadowed space into another. He clutched the shiv in his hand and squatted by the